10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 1 to vote Bush out of office...

What motivates George W. Bush to make the decisions that he makes? I don’t pretend to know his motivation, but in almost everything that I’ve come across regarding all my research into why I think you should not re-elect George Bush, there has been one overarching theme of this administration: big business. There is not much that Bush does out of pure ideology, and those things that he claims to be ideology can easily be seen to be pandering to the religious right.

Some of the most egregious examples of Bush’s corporate collusion are with Bush’s environmental initiatives. Enron is among Bush’s all time top corporate sponsors, Bush’s nickname for Kenneth Lay was Kenny Boy. The Texans for Public Justice have more:

The self-inflicted 2001 implosion of Ken Lay’s fraudulent paper tiger, Enron Corp., kicked off an extraordinary season of corporate scandals featuring a dizzying number of Bush Pioneers…who still walk the streets. The $550,025 that Ken Lay’s Enron Corp. gave Bush by mid 1999 made it his No. 1 career patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Lay, whom George W. Bush affectionately called “Kenny Boy,” became a master electrical power broker by mastering political power trading. “Virtually every … aspect of Enron’s operations is overseen by the federal government,” the Dallas Morning News noted in 1996. Enron even had software, dubbed “the matrix,” that estimated how much a particular regulatory change would cost. A tax dodger that received more than $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies, Enron was a huge political donor that kept a stable of ex-government officials on retainer (see Rob Mosbacher and William SchubertD. Stephen Goddard); law firm Vinson & Elkins (see Thomas Marinis); and investment firms too numerous to mention. Several Enron officials have pled guilty or been indicted for accounting fraud and manipulating California’s electricity market but its top officials remain at large. Despite a doctorate in economics, Lay has argued that he did not grasp the complex financial deals that Enron used to book huge profits--and cover up staggering losses. A report by Enron’s bankruptcy court examiner in late 2003 concluded that he and CEO Jeff Skilling “breached their fiduciary duties” because they “knew or should have known” Enron was cooking the books. The report said Lay could owe Enron’s creditors $94 million for repaying company loans with company stock.

Enron and Kenny Boy aren’t the only ones that have profited enormously because they colluded with the Bush administration. The NRDC has more (and there is plenty more where these came from):

Polluter support for Bush paying off bigMay 03, 2004: A new report sheds light on how corporate contributions to the Bush administration are paying off big for polluters. Since 1999, 30 power companies that own the nation's dirtiest power plants have raised $6.6 million for President Bush and the Republican National Committee, according to an analysis by Public Citizen. Executives at 10 of these utilities raised at least $100,000 or $200,000 each, earning them the honor of being named to the president's list of "pioneers" or "rangers," respectively. These top fundraisers for the president include executives at FirstEnergy Corp. ($865,877), Southern Co. ($807,062), TXU ($754,898), Dominion ($679,105), Centerpoint (formerly Reliant) Energy ($539,900), Cinergy Corp ($431,722), Exelon ($404,856), Edison Electric Institute ($348,750), Dynergy Inc. ($311,382) and Edison International ($192,291). Collectively, these top 10 industry fundraisers have raised $1.5 million over the last 5 years. Public Citizen's report draws a connection between this corporate gift-giving and political paybacks in the form of the administration's weakening changes to the Clean Air Act that benefit the utility industry."One of the Bush administration's biggest, most damaging environmental policy changes to date would weaken the Clean Air Act to allow power plants to emit more smokestack pollution," said John Walke, director of NRDC's clean air program.

Corporations shaped Bush energy policy, GAO saysAugust 25, 2003: An investigation by the General Accounting Office has confirmed what environmental groups have long contended: corporations played a significant role in formulating the Bush administration's energy policy. But the full extent of corporate influence is unknown because the White House still refuses to release key records related to the secretive energy policy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. According to the GAO's report, industry lobbyists from oil and gas, electricity, nuclear, coal and chemical companies gave detailed recommendations to the administration's task force while environmentalists and other experts were largely shut out of the process."We don't hate to say we told you so," said NRDC senior attorney Sharon Buccino, "we just hate that the Bush energy plan was crafted by and for polluting energy companies."NRDC won a lawsuit against the Energy Department that forced the disclosure of thousands of previously unreleased documents, many of which revealed the dealings between policymakers and industry. Another lawsuit against the White House is still pending in federal court. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch are pressing forward with a separate suit that would force the administration to reveal details of its secret meetings with industry officials. The GAO also filed its own suit to obtain information from the White House about the task force's dealings, but the suit was dismissed in federal court and the agency didn't appeal.

As I have mentioned in the past and I am continuing to hammer home, the war in Iraq was certainly not about WMDs or spreading democracy (don’t forget, both WMDs have not been found and democracy seems more and more unlikely every day). As Naomi Klein argues so strongly in her article Baghdad Year Zero, the war in Iraq was about creating a corporate utopia like the world has never seen. Iraq is not about protecting or freeing people, it is about crushing crony capitalism and the free market at any cost.

The Medicare deal was wrought with payoffs to big pharma. By limiting the government’s ability to negotiate drug prices the Medicare reform bill has guaranteed a windfall in profits for the drug companies. By preventing those who can’t afford to pay the prices in the US from going to Canada (where the government keeps prices low) the government is taking millions of dollars out of the pockets of Americans who need it the most and giving it to the mega rich drug companies. By locking people into one of the drug cards for a year while allowing the drug companies to change drugs or drug prices the Medicare bill has limited the rights of people to find the best deal and made it easier on the drug companies.

The President’s new push toward privatized social security (he said that he would work hard to privatize in his 2nd term) amounts to nothing more than big business collusion. Social Security can be solvent with the fiscal responsibility of the Clinton administration. Chile has a privatized Social Security program. The individual accounts cost the Chilean people 15% to 20% in fees. The Social Security Administration in the US actually has a very small overhead; by privatizing Social Security you would ultimately end up costing people who end up having to pay fees to invest their money (which in a privatized system, they would be forced to do). Furthermore, by requiring people to invest in the stock market, the government is essentially giving corporations a massive inflation in their profits. This may seem like a good thing, but when you have millions of workers that are not educated about or not interested in investing, then you will run into the situation where you have companies that are profiting not because they are worthwhile but because they are popular or they are the default. That doesn’t make businesses want to work to earn legitimate investment in their stocks, and it certainly isn’t good for the average American.

Then there is the military industrial complex. It is no secret that Bush is a massive fan of the Star Wars program. It is also not a secret that the Star Wars program is a multi-billion dollar project. It is easy to understand why the Bush administration fought so hard for a Star Wars program despite the fact that our most current and credible threat is not from ICBMs but from terrorists. The US military’s budget is approaching $400 billion dollars and is greater than the total amount spent by the next 20 biggest military spenders. This figure is as of 2002 and does not include discretionary spending for Operation Enduring Freedom or Operation Iraqi Freedom which total anywhere between $120 billion to $200 billion so far. That puts our military spending to more than the total military spending for the rest of the world combined. We are in an arms race with ourselves and the only winners are the mega corporations making the weapon systems.

This President is in the pockets of big business like no other president in history. More importantly, Bush cloaks his actions in a veil of pandering ideology that blinds people to his actions and gets them to support him and vote against their own interest. The time has come to take the action that American’s hold so dearly. If you are reading this in the United States, it is likely November 1st. Consider carefully the facts that I have presented to you, understand that the Bush Administration does not have your best interests in mind and tomorrow, vote wisely. Your vote will help determine the tenor in the United States, the security of the US, the quality of the environment, the standing of the United States in the rest of the world for decades to come, and your children’s and grandchildren’s futures. Change is needed, I urge you to do your part.

On the road again...

Actually I've been on the road for a couple of days. I have all my 10 days 10 reasons posts all pre-written so all I have to do is log on and publish the posts. It's a good thing I did that, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to get that done. On the other hand, those 10 reasons added up to about 13,400 words ... and high fives to everyone who read all of them (or will have read all of them tomorrow that is)!

In other news, this trip has been an absolute nightmare. Col Cranky™ has seen fit to make sure that all of his little menial gripes about the USAF have been projected onto me. I find that ironic because I am the last person that would be able to change anything that he's complaining about. It comes down to him wanting to go home and him expecting the USAF to just drop every last damned thing to accommodate him on his schedule. Plus, he just doesn't know what's going on and he flies off the handle at the speculation that things may possibly not go how he would like them to go. He's just your typical grade A jerk. It's guys like him that make people want to get out of the military or not join at all in the first place. He'll be gone soon though.

Damned internet cafe time limits...

More later maybe.

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 2 to vote Bush out of office...

I have been pre-writing these posts since the middle of October. I have been struggling to decide what exactly I wanted to post as my number 2nd reason not to vote for Bush. The two choices I came up with were either the war in Iraq or the Supreme Court. I have chosen to discuss the Supreme Court for a few reasons. First, I feel that since the war in Iraq is the main problem that most people have with Bush, it gets plenty of coverage. Second, and probably most frustratingly, because I’m in the military I don’t enjoy the same level of freedom of speech as other citizens in the US. It is possible that I could face serious consequences for saying what I want to say. I’m walking a very fine line as it is and I think taking a giant leap over to the other side would be pushing it (I will continue to discuss it in general terms with respect to how it affects people, but I can’t attack it directly.) Finally, just yesterday (as of the time of this writing) the issue of Supreme Court justices has been pushed into the lime light with the announcement that Justice Rehnquist has Thyroid cancer.

First I want to say that I will simply assume that if you are a reader of at ease, you are at least nominally well informed about your American civics. You understand the sweeping implications that a Supreme Court justice can have on the lives of every day citizens. You don’t read this blog because you can’t wait to see what Radiohead lyrics I’ll post next or what percentage of my tour is completed (although hopefully you do enjoy those posts a little). If you come back to this blog it is because you are interested in the topics on which I’ve chosen to post, which has been mainly political up to this point. No matter your political affiliation, you understand.

So what kind of Supreme Court justice would Bush nominate? Realistically, I can’t get into Bush’s head to know who he would put on the bench today if given the chance. What I can do is take a look at not only the people that Bush has nominated to be federal judges but also the means in which he has used to subvert the system to get them onto the bench.

During the debates Bush was asked if there were a vacancy on the Supreme Court who he would fill that vacancy with. This is how Bush responded:

I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn't pick.

I wouldn't pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn't be said in a school because it had the words "under God" in it. I think that's an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.

That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America.

And so, I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We've got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.

And I suspect one of us will have a pick at the end of next year -- the next four years. And that's the kind of judge I'm going to put on there. No litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution.

So Bush opens up telling us that he wouldn’t pick a judge that would let their personal opinions “get in the way of the law.” But in his very next breath he gives some examples of personal opinions that he would not mind getting in the way of the law: the pledge of allegiance case. The President considers his opinion to be law and in his opinion the pledge should be allowed in public schools. In fact the very idea of it is equivalent to a famously bad Supreme Court decision.

As an aside, the Dred Scott case was not about personal property rights it was about racism: “The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney – a staunch supporter of slavery – wrote the "majority opinion" for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.”

So Mr. Bush has a litmus test: his personal opinion about what is law and what is not law. Any judge who disagrees with Bush’s opinions on the law will not get a nomination; furthermore, the closer that a person’s opinions match up with Mr. Bush’s opinions; the more likely they are to get a nomination. So what kinds of people would Bush nominate to be judges?

In April of 2003 President Bush nominated Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Here’s what The Washington post had to say about that:

Washington Post
Apr 11, 2003

PRESIDENT BUSH must have worked hard to dream up an escalation of the judicial nomination wars as dramatic as his decision this week to nominate Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. A protégé of Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, Mr. Pryor is a parody of what Democrats imagine Mr. Bush to be plotting for the federal courts. We have argued strongly in favor of several of Mr. Bush's nominees -- and urged fair and swift consideration of all. And we have criticized Democratic attacks on nominees of substance and quality. But we have also urged Mr. Bush to look for common ground on judicial nominations, to address legitimate Democratic grievances and to seek nominees of such stature as defies political objection. The Pryor nomination shows that Mr. Bush has other ideas.

Mr. Pryor is probably best known as a zealous advocate of relaxing the wall between church and state. He teamed up with one of Pat Robertson's organizations in a court effort to defend student-led prayer in public schools, and he has vocally defended Alabama's chief justice, who has insisted on displaying the Ten Commandments in state court facilities. But his career is broader. He has urged the repeal of a key section of the Votings Rights Act, which he regards as "an affront to federalism and an expensive burden." He has also called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history." Whatever one thinks of Roe, it is offensive to rank it among the court's most notorious cases, which include Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, after all.

Mr. Pryor's speeches display a disturbingly politicized view of the role of courts. He has suggested that impeachment is an appropriate remedy for judges who "repeatedly and recklessly . . . overturn popular will and . . . rewrite constitutional law." And he talks publicly about judging in the vulgarly political terms of the current judicial culture war. He concluded one speech, for example, with the following prayer: "Please, God, no more Souters" -- a reference to the betrayal many conservatives feel at the honorable career of Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter.

Mr. Pryor has bipartisan support in Alabama, and he worked to repeal the provisions in that state's constitution that forbade interracial marriage. But this is not a nomination the White House can sell as above politics. Mr. Bush cannot at once ask for apolitical consideration of his nominees and put forth nominees who, in word and deed, turn federal courts into political battlegrounds. If he sends the Senate nominees such as Mr. Pryor, he cannot complain too loudly when his nominees receive the most searching scrutiny.

As you can see, Mr. Pryor is the epitome of the hard core religious right. But is he indicative of the types of judges that Bush would nominate? Are there any more examples? Well there is Charles Pickering:

Civil Rights Record on the Bench. As a federal district court judge, Charles Pickering has been indifferent and sometimes even hostile to cases brought to address injustices. In 1994, Judge Pickering presided over a case in which the government brought criminal charges against three individuals for burning a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple. Two of the defendants pled guilty, but Daniel Swan went to trial and was convicted of charges resulting in a mandatory seven years in prison. Although Pickering has a reputation for being a law-and-order judge, he claimed to have been troubled by the disparities between Swan's sentence and those of his two co-defendants. He repeatedly used off-the-record threats and other methods to force prosecutors to drop the most serious charge against Swan. Pickering then sentenced Swan to 27 months in prison-almost five fewer years than the law required-for an act that he called a "drunken prank."

He has also been hostile to other lawsuits involving civil rights issues. He called the one person/one vote doctrine "obtrusive" and has complained that strengthening African-American voting power through the redistricting process could be harmful. He has rarely ruled in favor of an employment discrimination plaintiff. When asked about his unbalanced record on employment discrimination cases at his 2002 confirmation hearing, Pickering made the outrageous assertion that meritorious claims are resolved by the EEOC and generally only those lacking in merit are brought to the federal courts.

Civil Rights Record as an Attorney. Pickering's actions on the bench reinforce dramatically that the insensitivity he demonstrated as a young lawyer towards some of the most divisive issues our nation has faced continues unabated. As a law student in 1959, Pickering wrote an article suggesting a way for Mississippi to strengthen its law against interracial marriage. Soon after his law school graduation, he formed a three-person law partnership with a man who ran for governor as a "total segregationist." Later, as a legislator serving in the all-white Mississippi state Senate, he voted against several measures intended to expand electoral opportunities for African- Americans. He also voted to continue funding for the Sovereignty Commission, a notorious state-funded agency founded to fight desegregation in Mississippi and to spy on civil rights and union activists.

At his 1990 hearing for a district court seat, Pickering stated under oath: "I never had any contact with [the Sovereignty Commission] and I had disagreement with the purposes and the methods and some of the approaches that they took." Not only had Pickering voted to fund the Sovereignty Commission, recently released documents include a memo to the Commission's files indicating that Pickering was "very interested" in a Sovereignty Commission investigation into union activity in his hometown and "requested to be apprised of developments" regarding the investigation.

Reproductive Freedom. Pickering is anti-choice. As a state senator, he voted for a constitutional convention to pass an amendment overturning Roe v. Wade. He also chaired the committee for the Republican Party that originally drafted the party platform plank opposing abortion even in cases of rape or incest or to protect the health of a pregnant woman.

Opposition. Judge Pickering's nomination has been opposed by a broad coalition of public interest groups as noted below. In addition, the Congressional Black Caucus has written a letter to Senator Leahy opposing Pickering's confirmation to the Fifth Circuit:

We would like to make our position perfectly clear to you and the Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Congressional Black Caucus adamantly opposes the nomination of Mr. Pickering to the Fifth Circuit. Mr. Pickering's career and record on civil rights is a grave concern. Mr. Pickering also has a quarter-century of hostility to women's rights, including a woman's right to choose.

Bush not only nominated Charles Pickering, he renominated Pickering after his nomination was defeated in committee. Pickering’s renomination was also defeated so Mr. Bush decided to give him a recess appointment. When the nominee who fit Mr. Bush’s agenda could not get approved, he tried again, and when he could not get approved for a second time, he resorted to underhanded, desperate tricks. Rather than choose a candidate that could get bipartisan support, he subverted the process to push through his radical nominee.

The list of judges with radical right agendas doesn’t stop there by any means. Bush has also nominated Charles Allen, Priscilla Owen, Richard Allen Griffin, William Haynes, Brett Kavanaugh, Carolyn Kuhl, David W. McKeague, William G. Myers III, Janice Rogers Brown, Terrence William Boyle, and others. The one thing that all these nominees have in common is their radically conservative agenda. It is clear that, given the chance (and it is almost a certainty that he will have at least one and up to three chances), Bush would do whatever it took to get someone that is as much of a hard right conservative as any of the nominees that I’ve discussed here on to the Supreme Court. This would have real and long lasting consequences to our everyday lives.

Bush’s judicial agenda is alarming; he does not deserve to be re-elected.

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 3 to vote Bush out of office...

When George Bush was asked about his performance with regard to the environment at the second debate, he had this to say:

I guess you'd say I'm a good steward of the land.

The quality of the air's cleaner since I've been the president. Fewer water complaints since I've been the president. More land being restored since I've been the president.

The folks over at the official Bush Cheney re-election website tell us this:

Over the last four years, the air has become cleaner, our water more pure, and we have reversed the net loss of wetlands. In addition, our parks are better managed, better funded, and better protected. Throughout his first term, President Bush has launched a series of climate change initiatives to improve scientific understanding and reduce emissions through the use of new, energy-efficient technologies. He has proposed several clean air initiatives that will dramatically improve air quality and public health.

It certainly sounds as if nobody should have anything to complain about. If, as Bush says, the air is cleaner, the waters are less poisoned, and global warming is being brought under control then it must just be those easily dismissed tree hugging hippie loons that think else wise.

Sometimes facts aren’t our friends; and in this case, they are mortal enemies of the President. Fortunately there are some news sources that are still interested in providing us with facts:

Knight Ridder compiled 14 pollution-oriented indicators from government and university statistics. Nine of the 14 indicators showed a worsening trend, two showed improvements and three others zigzagged.

Statistics that have worsened:

• Superfund cleanups of toxic waste fell by 52 percent.


• Fish-consumption warnings for rivers doubled.


• Fish-consumption advisories for lakes increased 39 percent.


• The number of beach closings rose 26 percent.


• Civil citations issued to polluters fell 57 percent.


• Criminal pollution prosecutions dropped 17 percent.


• Asthma attacks increased by 6 percent.


• There were small increases in global temperatures and unhealthy air days.

But as we have seen, a picture tells a thousand words. In your opinion, do those graphics represent good stewardship?

One of the most egregious examples of Bush’s bad environmental policies is when he pulled the US out of the Kyoto treaty. Why do you think that is? Is it because other countries are just looking for any way to hate us and bring us down? Maybe.

And maybe not. The US has 4.6% of the world’s population, 30% of the world’s economy, and is the world’s number one polluter both in total and per capita. The Kyoto Treaty proposed that all industrialized nations would be required “to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 8% of the 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.” The Bush administration pulled its support from the Kyoto Treaty by March of 2001, thus effectively killing the measure that would have made a substantial impact on air quality around the globe.

It is extremely difficult to pinpoint the most egregious example of Bush’s anti-environmental policies – in fact it may take all day long just to read through all of Bush’s poor environmental record – but perhaps the one initiative that stands out is the Clear Skies Initiative. The Bush administration commissioned a study by a research organization called “Clear the Air” to study the impacts of the Clear Skies Initiative in 2004. On June 9, 2004, Clear the Air issued a press release that said:

"The results are staggering," said Angela Ledford, Director, Clear the Air. "The Bush administration knows how to solve this problem. But instead of simply enforcing the law, they are allowing the polluters to rewrite the rules, weaken current law, and pass it off as progress."

The report compares the premature deaths that would result under the Bush administration's air pollution plan, the existing Clean Air Act, and a proposal sponsored by Senator Jim Jeffords to strengthen the Clean Air Act. The Administration’s proposal would allow 4,000 preventable premature deaths each year compared with simply enforcing current law, while repealing the very safeguards that could save those lives.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NDRC) has this to say about the Clear Skies Initiative:

Bush air pollution plan weakens current law, threatens public health February 27, 2003: The Bush administration's air pollution plan, misleadingly dubbed the "Clear Skies Initiative," was reintroduced in Congress. If enacted, the plan would weaken public health protections of the current Clean Air Act. It would delay and dilute cuts in power plants' sulfur, nitrogen and mercury pollution compared to timely enforcement of current law. By allowing industry to make fewer reductions in toxic pollution over a much longer period of time than current law, critics say the plan would cost thousands of lives, intensify global warming and reward polluting industries that have been flouting the law for years.

The administration plan allows more than twice as much SO2 for nearly a decade longer (2010-18), compared with faithful enforcement of the current Clean Air Act. After 2018, SO2 emissions will still be one and a half times higher than if current law is enforced. The plan allows more than one and a half times as much NOx for nearly a decade longer (2010-2018), and one third more NOx even after 2018. The plan also lets power plants emit more than five times as much mercury for a decade longer (2010-2018), and three times as much after 2018.

"The Bush air pollution plan would It would make lethal pollution legal, condemning millions of Americans to breathing dangerous air," said David Doniger, policy director of NRDC's Climate Center.

Again, this administration’s hubris is unmatched. We have had this administration tell us time after time that their environmental policy is what is best for the people of this country. The fact of the matter is that Bush’s policies have benefited one group of people, the corporations and their shareholders. Policies like the Clear Skies Initiative will dramatically affect the health of the American people and loose regulations on drilling for oil have only eroded this country’s national parks. And at the same time, Bush is not using the tools that he does have available to prosecute polluters or clean superfund sites.

Kerry has an extremely strong environmental record in the Senate and he has the backing of environmental groups. Bush has the support of polluters. Vote for Kerry so we can ensure that our environment will remain unspoiled by pollution for our children and grandchildren.

African American Voter Suppression...

The following pamphlet is being distributed in the African American communities in Milwaukee:



The plain fact of the matter is that something like 80% (or more) of African Americans vote democratic. This is blatant black voter suppression by the Republicans. and it is outrageous. I mean come on! They'll take your children away???

The Daily Kos has more...

Holy Crap! It's Friday already!

One thing that happens to you when you're working every day of the week is that you get to a point where you don't realize what day of the week it is. I had no idea it was Friday until I saw Tbogg's Basset Blogging.

Being that it's Friday, let's have a look-see at our Pie Chart From Hell!



What's cooler than being cool?

ICE COLD!

Can you believe that I'm over the hump? I'm half way done today, kick ass!

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 4 to vote Bush out of office...

You know, sometimes facts simply speak for themselves. This post will likely be the shortest of all of my posts, but it will contain the most information. Bush’s record on job growth has been abysmal to say the least. Keep the following factoid in mind:

Bush’s best job performance is worse than Clinton’s worst job performance.

Here are the down and dirty facts (all graphs link to source page):

This is a graph that shows the actual job performance as the bold black line, and Bush’s hopelessly optimistic yearly predictions in light grey.



This graph shows the rate at which jobs were created or were lost during the duration of a 4 year term:



Compare that with Clinton’s job performance in his first term:



And Clinton’s second term:



Do you remember the “jobless recovery” of the 1990s? The following graph shows the number of jobs in that recovery (the orange line) and the number of jobs in our current recovery (the blue line). Both start at a baseline of 100 that is 6 months prior to the official start of the recession.



At the current rate of growth of jobs, Bush’s job recession will last until July 2005. That means that it will be a 52 month job recession. How does that compare with other recessions under other Presidents? Like this:



According to the administration, this is the result of sound fiscal policy. All those tax cuts that Bush gave to the corporations and the super-rich were supposed to trickle down and create new jobs at an astounding rate. That didn’t happen. It’s time for a new President, vote Bush out of office.

Lots of shout outs (shouts out?) to give!

Ever since I joined the PBA, I've been getting some great positive feedback about my blog. I just want to say thanks to everyone who has taken the time to not only read the blog, but in many cases make comments, write emails, or blogroll me. The vast majority of the hits on at ease have come from Needlenose. The wit and biting sarcasm you can find over at Needlenose cracks me up and makes some very serious points at the same time. I appreciate that Needlenose blogged me mostly because it wasn't until they blogged me that I found them. You'll find them on my links to the right shortly.

Also, I wanted to give a big shout out to rab from the great Why Are We Back in Iraq? blog. He's shown me nothing but support on his blog and in the brand new PBA forums. So thanks for the support and welcome to my links list!

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 5 to vote Bush out of office...

Like just about everyone in the US and many people around the world, I remember exactly what I was doing on September 11, 2001. At that point I had been at McConnell AFB in Wichita, KS for just under a year – my first duty assignment was Robins AFB, GA, but I volunteered to take an assignment to McConnell after 8 months because navigators were getting hardly any flight time due to equipment changes in the KC-135. The weekend prior, I had been a part of a really big deal exercise and I got to spend that weekend on base rather than with my (then girlfriend) Beth at Vance AFB, OK where she was going through pilot training. The week prior, I had been giving serious thought to moving out of the tiny apartment that I was living in and moving into a house, and on 9/11, I had spent the early part of the morning looking at houses for rent on the internet.

It was one of those late summer / early fall days in the Midwest that I absolutely love. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, there was a hint of a chill in the air, and I didn’t have a care in the world. I have a 12 disc CD player in my car and the radio has never really picked up any good reception for some reason, so up to that point, I had absolutely zero contact with any news.

When I got into work, there was nothing going on, no people roaming the halls even though there were plenty of cars there, nobody mission planning or anything. I didn’t think much of it, I had seen the squadron like that before. It wasn’t until I got into the scheduling office (where I worked) where one of the guys was listening to the radio that I heard that the world trade center was on fire. My first thought was that they must be reliving the bombing of 1993 for some odd reason. The guy that was in there said “No a plane has run into the World Trade Center, it’s all over the news.” I immediately went into the break room and found everyone in the squadron crowded around the TV. It wasn’t until we actually watched the 2nd plane hit the 2nd tower that most of us realized that it was no accident (one of the dimmer bulbs in the crowd exclaimed what we were all thinking “Whoa dude, how can that be an accident?”)

Our Squadron Director of Operations (DO) knew how things work and pointed at one guy and said, “You, start running the THREATCON Alpha checklist,” pointed at another guy and said, “You, start running the THREATCON Bravo checklist,” looked at another guy and said, “You, start running the THREATCON Charlie checklist,” and then said, “Standby for THREATCON Delta.” We were at Delta within the hour, by that afternoon I was in crew rest for an Alpha alert that would last a week and would see me flying Combat Air Patrol (CAP) missions over Denver when all other traffic was grounded. By the end of that week, we departed for Bangor, Maine where tankers were flying CAP missions over New York City and Washington, DC. After doing that for 3 weeks, we headed out to Qatar for 2 months and the rest is history.

But did it have to happen?

On April 30, 2001, the CNN show “Inside Politics” kicked off its program by covering the measures that Bush was taking with regard to the ballistic missile defense system.

JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: And we're coming to you from Atlanta today, and thanks for joining us. We begin with President Bush's efforts to smooth the way for his controversial goal of building a missile defense system. He spoke by telephone today with the leaders of Britain, Germany, France and Canada, and with the NATO secretary- general. Mr. Bush is reaching out to allies who are cool to his missile defense plan before he gives a key speech on that subject in Washington tomorrow.

CNN's David Ensor has more on the speech and the president's nuclear arms strategy.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The president's speech will highlight sweeping changes he plans in the way the U.S. defends itself, and announce that he is sending a team to hear allied concerns before he spells out the specific details later this spring.

BUSH: It should be possible to reduce the number of American nuclear weapons significantly further.

ENSOR: The final decisions are not made yet, but officials are preparing proposals for dramatic unilateral cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, taking it from over 7,000 weapons down to as low as 1,500; slashing the number of bombing targets in Russia in the event of war; adding a small number of new targets in China; increasing by as much as $7 billion research and development of strategic and theater ballistic missile defense systems; adding sea-based and space-based systems to the land-based plan already in testing under the Clinton administration.

BUSH: At the earliest possible date, my administration will deploy anti-ballistic missile systems.

ENSOR: The problem for Mr. Bush: the earliest possible date for missile defense may well be after he leaves office.

JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT: We have years to go just in testing and research to find out if there is anything worth deploying.

ENSOR: What's more, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty clearly forbids any kind of national missile defense. So, kill the treaty now? A debate is raging within the administration. Secretary of State Powell and his aides favor going slow.

CIRINCIONE: I think withdrawal from the ABM treaty would cause a major international crisis at this point. It could dominate the president's first year in office, and he doesn't need that.

ENSOR: On the other side, administration hawks, like Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and their aides, are pushing hard for Mr. Bush to abrogate the ABM treaty this spring and go it alone on nuclear weapons.

RICHARD PERLE, FORMER ASSISTANT DEFENSE SECRETARY: We should decide what we need, keep only what we need and no more than that, and then proceed to shape our strategic forces consistent with what we judge our requirements to be. There's no reason to ask the Russians for their approval any more than we should be asking anyone else for their approval.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ENSOR: Some are also arguing for the development of new nuclear weapons that can penetrate deep into the Earth to go after chemical or biological weapons facilities or leadership bunkers. But still others within the administration argue that to do so will put the president on record in favor of new nuclear weapons at a time when he's trying to convince the world he's in favor of defense, not offense -- Judy.

While the President was out trying to persuade other countries to let us go about the unbelievably expensive and complex (and illegal since it was specifically forbidden by the ABM treaty) task of completing Reagan’s Star Wars program, others in the Bush Administration were hard at work on their duties. What Mrs. Woodruff reported almost as an aside would turn out to have profound implications four-and-a-half months later:

WOODRUFF: We will have more of the day's political news coming up. But now a look at some other top stories.

…

The State Department officially released its annual terrorism report just a little more than an hour ago, but unlike last year, there's no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. A senior State Department official tells CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden and "personalizing terrorism."

Of course, we all know the official line: The administration did what they could, the terrorists were absolutely unpredictable and the terrorists snuck through our defenses, our intelligence was bad, and they just plain couldn’t have imagined that it would happen. It wasn’t until Condoleezza Rice was famously asked to inform everyone what the title of the August 6th Presidential Daily Brief was that the public got a glimpse of what the administration knew before September 11th: Osama Bin Laden Determined to Attack inside the US. Obviously, our hindsight has become clear, what is most distressing is the understanding of just how much information the Bush administration had and did not act upon. The focus was faith-based initiatives and missile defense and they felt it was a mistake to follow in the footsteps of the Clinton administration and focus so much time and energy on Osama Bin Laden.

The Clinton administration knew the seriousness of the terror threat, so much so that they had drafted a plan to attack Afghanistan and the terrorist camps and freeze the assets of the terrorists (a plan that was much the same as the plan enacted shortly after 9/11). Sandy Berger had briefed the Afghanistan attack plan to the incoming Bush administration who then promptly sat on it for 8 months. Bush and Ashcroft had other priorities than terrorism – the missile defense shield, the war on drugs, and cracking down on pornography – and were skeptical of anything to do with the Clinton administration.

Six months later, while Bush was on vacation in Crawford, he received his now infamous June 6 PDB. According to John D. Rockefeller III (D-WV), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, on April 9, 2004, “At a time when our intelligence experts were warning of a possible strike against the United States, it's clear that the administration didn't take the threat seriously enough to marshal the resources that might have possibly thwarted the attack.”

Now, there are new reports coming out of a CIA report on the events leading up to 9/11. According to one intelligence official, “the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.” Unfortunately for the American voter, the report is “being suppressed” according to that intelligence official. It is a report that names names and “found very senior-level officials responsible.” When released that report will simply verify what I’ve already told you, the Bush administration did not consider terrorism to be a top priority in the days leading up to 9/11. It is this lack of focus where Bush dropped the ball. Quite simply, 9/11 did not have to happen.

What will Bush drop the ball on next time? Let’s not find out. Don’t vote for Bush on November 2nd.

Voter Suppression in Florida Part II

Kos has a story that is awfully troubling to me and it should be troubling to you too. According to the BBC:

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Election supervisor Ion Sancho believes some voters are being intimidated.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day." [...]

In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were using the lists or other means of intimidating voters, we filmed a private detective filming every "early voter" - the majority of whom are black - from behind a vehicle with blacked-out windows.

The private detective claimed not to know who was paying for his all-day services.

On the scene, Democratic Congresswoman Corinne Brown said the surveillance operation was part of a campaign of intimidation tactics used by the Republican Party to intimate and scare off African American voters, almost all of whom are registered Democrats

Now what the hell kind of PI doesn't know who is paying him?

Kos ultimately makes this out to be trying to prevent the military vote because some of the people that are affected are assigned to NAF Jacksonville. Honestly, I don't approve of that approach. Kos, it appears to me (and I could be wrong), is using the military to generate more support in the public. I think that informing people that the folks in the campaign are trying to suppress the rights of voters (regardless of occupation, color, religion, or whatever) should be enough.

Now, having said that, I can say this: Holy Fucking Shit -- I try to keep the language down usually, but this is a special case. Here's the absolutely perfect part of this, they are caught red handed. See, there's a W. re-election parody site at www.georgewbush.org that has intercepted some seriously damning emails that are not parodies. Anyone who inadvertently sent an email to [username]@georgewbush.org rather than the campaign's real domain georgewbush.com had their email intercepted by the anti-Bush parody site's owners.

Expect this to become a bigger issue.

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 6 to vote Bush out of office...

This year one of the biggest political hot potatoes has become the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. Bush has touted his plan which includes the prescription drug card (which, according to factcheck.org has received an underwhelming response) and limits the government’s ability to negotiate with the drug companies as “…honoring the commitments of Medicare to all our seniors” (as quoted on the official George Bush re-election website).

There are other reactions to this Medicare plan however. Helen Halpin, the Director of the Center for Health and Public Policy Studies and a health policy professor at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health explains why Bush’s Medicare proposal offers incentives to seniors to use managed plans from for-profit HMOs rather than government funded programs. In effect, Bush has once again struck a major coup for profit-driven HMOs. For-profit managed care providers are more interested in the bottom line rather than providing the best service with the money they have available.

There are the much publicized stories about seniors who tried to go to Canada to buy their prescription drugs for lower prices (Canada has price controls on its prescription drugs) only to have them taken from them by the border guards on the way back into the US. Conveniently, the FDA issued a re-goddamned-diculous terror warning against illegally imported prescription drugs from Canada saying that al-Qaeda was planning on poisoning those drugs. Of course, by preventing (or scaring) seniors from buying drugs from red Canada, the administration has effectively tried to plug any leaks in the revenue stream for big pharma at a time when the prices for drugs increased at triple the rate of inflation.

Then there are those prescription drug cards that Bush is so fond of. Those cards are far from a dream according to Ed Foster

The sneakwrap techniques of never making a promise to your customers you can't break have been perfected mostly by the software and telecom industries. But one reader points out another arena in which sneakwrap is being taken to new heights: the Medicare discount drug card program.

"It looks like sneakwrap is becoming the new wave," the reader wrote, pointing to some of the objections that have been raised regarding the Medicare-approved drug discount cards. "Want to know what drugs 'Brand X' card let you get at a discount? Well, it depends. You need to choose your card carefully, because not every card has a complete formulary. And, by law, you are stuck with that card for a year --no switching, even if you are willing to pay again for a new card. So you have to check the up-to-date list on the Internet and carefully pick the card that covers all the drugs you need."

But while customers can switch Medicare discount cards only once a year, the card providers can change drugs and prices every week. "The discount card company can add or remove any drug from their formulary, at any time," the reader wrote. "They are trying to figure out how many card holders they will have, and how much of what drugs they will move. And if it turns out they are not making money, or maybe they just want to fold and keep the cash they have collected so far, the card company can simply discontinue services, leaving the cardholders to wait the rest of their 12 months to try again. So even though you picked the card carefully to cover your needs, the card company could just drop all of your needed drugs within the month. No penalties, it's perfectly legal."

And, in the grand sneakwrap tradition, all the Medicare card providers have to do is change the formulary on their website. "Yes, on that same website list you used to pick the card so carefully, they can just take it off the list, like it was never there," the reader wrote. "No, they don't need show a history of when they add and drop drugs. Why would you want to be able to see if they add and drop drugs a lot? Well, that's just tough -- you can't."

Of course, what really makes the revocable nature of the Medicare drug discounts particularly disturbing is the fact that it's we taxpayers, and not the drug companies, that are footing the bill for them. And, as someone who is all too rapidly approaching Medicare age myself, I wonder how long it will before the sneakwrap approach will be apply to other Medicare benefits, or even Social Security? In a sneakwrapped world, will we have any entitlements that can't be taken away by someone changing the rules on an obscure web page no one bothers to read?

Again, the trend here is clear. The Bush administration has done everything it can to make their plans appear appealing to seniors and to actually BE appealing to the drug companies.

The deceptions in this Medicare bill certainly don’t end there. Even the passing of the Medicare bill was absolutely wrought with accusations of infidelity. For starters, the voting for the bill was held open for nearly three hours – voting on a bill will often times be held open for 15 minutes to catch stragglers, but three hours is unheard of. Then there are the accusations of bribery. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that the then Medicare administrator, Thomas A. Scully, had threatened to fire an actuary who had determined that the Medicare bill would cost over $150 billion more than what the Bush administration estimated if that actuary revealed that information to anyone. It was not until after the bill was passed and signed into law that the true cost of the bill $551.5 billion over 10 years was revealed. According to the New York Times:

Ultimately, the legislation squeaked through the House by a final vote of 220 to 215, but only after Republican leaders kept the roll call open for nearly three hours while they twisted the arms of recalcitrant party members. Had the cost estimates been higher than the Congressional Budget Office figures, lawmakers of both parties say, it is possible the Republican-backed bill would have been doomed, or at least significantly altered.

This administrations gall, dishonesty, and downright corporate pandering at the expense of some of the neediest citizens of our country is amazing. Even if there was nothing else that the Bush administration had done wrong, the Medicare issue would be a very good reason to vote Bush out of office.

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 7 to vote Bush out of office...

Today, the motto is “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” To wit, since Bush and Rove have spent so much effort on making John Kerry’s supposed flip-flops an issue, I am going to quote a very long list of Bush flip-flops that I found on the Center for American Progress. One could argue that the CAP is biased, but since all the quotes are given with links for context (something you will rarely ever find on a site detailing Kerry’s supposed flip-flops) you can make up your own mind.

1. Social Security Surplus

BUSH PLEDGES NOT TO TOUCH SOCIAL SECURITY SURPLUS... "We're going to keep the promise of Social Security and keep the government from raiding the Social Security surplus." [President Bush, 3/3/01]

...BUSH SPENDS SOCIAL SECURITY SURPLUS The New York Times reported that "the president's new budget uses Social Security surpluses to pay for other programs every year through 2013, ultimately diverting more than $1.4 trillion in Social Security funds to other purposes." [The New York Times, 2/6/02]

2. Patient's Right to Sue

GOVERNOR BUSH VETOES PATIENTS' RIGHT TO SUE... "Despite his campaign rhetoric in favor of a patients' bill of rights, Bush fought such a bill tooth and nail as Texas governor, vetoing a bill coauthored by Republican state Rep. John Smithee in 1995. He... constantly opposed a patient's right to sue an HMO over coverage denied that resulted in adverse health effects." [Salon, 2/7/01]

...CANDIDATE BUSH PRAISES TEXAS PATIENTS' RIGHT TO SUE... "We're one of the first states that said you can sue an HMO for denying you proper coverage... It's time for our nation to come together and do what's right for the people. And I think this is right for the people. You know, I support a national patients' bill of rights, Mr. Vice President. And I want all people covered. I don't want the law to supersede good law like we've got in Texas." [Governor Bush, 10/17/00]

...PRESIDENT BUSH'S ADMINISTRATION ARGUES AGAINST RIGHT TO SUE "To let two Texas consumers, Juan Davila and Ruby R. Calad, sue their managed-care companies for wrongful denials of medical benefits ‘would be to completely undermine' federal law regulating employee benefits, Assistant Solicitor General James A. Feldman said at oral argument March 23. Moreover, the administration's brief attacked the policy rationale for Texas's law, which is similar to statutes on the books in nine other states." [Washington Post, 4/5/04]

3. Tobacco Buyout

BUSH SUPPORTS CURRENT TOBACCO FARMERS' QUOTA SYSTEM... "They've got the quota system in place -- the allotment system -- and I don't think that needs to be changed." [President Bush, 5/04]

...BUSH ADMINISTRATION WILL SUPPORT FEDERAL BUYOUT OF TOBACCO QUOTAS "The administration is open to a buyout." [White House spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo, 6/18/04]

4. North Korea

BUSH WILL NOT OFFER NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA INCENTIVES TO DISARM... "We developed a bold approach under which, if the North addressed our long-standing concerns, the United States was prepared to take important steps that would have significantly improved the lives of the North Korean people. Now that North Korea's covert nuclear weapons program has come to light, we are unable to pursue this approach." [President's Statement, 11/15/02]

...BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFERS NORTH KOREA INCENTIVES TO DISARM" Well, we will work to take steps to ease their political and economic isolation. So there would be -- what you would see would be some provisional or temporary proposals that would only lead to lasting benefit after North Korea dismantles its nuclear programs. So there would be some provisional or temporary efforts of that nature." [White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 6/23/04]

5. Abortion

BUSH SUPPORTS A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE... "Bush said he...favors leaving up to a woman and her doctor the abortion question." [The Nation, 6/15/00, quoting the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, 5/78]

...BUSH OPPOSES A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE "I am pro-life." [Governor Bush, 10/3/00]

6. OPEC

BUSH PROMISES TO FORCE OPEC TO LOWER PRICES... "What I think the president ought to do [when gas prices spike] is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots...And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price." [President Bush, 1/26/00]

...BUSH REFUSES TO LOBBY OPEC LEADERS With gas prices soaring in the United States at the beginning of 2004, the Miami Herald reported the president refused to "personally lobby oil cartel leaders to change their minds." [Miami Herald, 4/1/04]

7. Iraq Funding

BUSH SPOKESMAN DENIES NEED FOR ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR THE REST OF 2004... "We do not anticipate requesting supplemental funding for '04" [White House Budget Director Joshua Bolton, 2/2/04]

...BUSH REQUESTS ADDITIONAL FUNDS FOR IRAQ FOR 2004 "I am requesting that Congress establish a $25 billion contingency reserve fund for the coming fiscal year to meet all commitments to our troops." [President Bush, Statement by President, 5/5/04]

8. Condoleezza Rice Testimony

BUSH SPOKESMAN SAYS RICE WON'T TESTIFY AS 'A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE'... "Again, this is not her personal preference; this goes back to a matter of principle. There is a separation of powers issue involved here. Historically, White House staffers do not testify before legislative bodies. So it's a matter of principle, not a matter of preference." [White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, 3/9/04]

...BUSH ORDERS RICE TO TESTIFY: "Today I have informed the Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States that my National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, will provide public testimony." [President Bush, 3/30/04]

9. Science

BUSH PLEDGES TO ISSUE REGULATIONS BASED ON SCIENCE..."I think we ought to have high standards set by agencies that rely upon science, not by what may feel good or what sounds good." [then-Governor George W. Bush, 1/15/00]

...BUSH ADMINISTRATION REGULATIONS IGNORE SCIENCE "60 leading scientists including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents—issued a statement calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking. According to the scientists, the Bush administration has, among other abuses, suppressed and distorted scientific analysis from federal agencies, and taken actions that have undermined the quality of scientific advisory panels." [Union of Concerned Scientists, 2/18/04]

10. Ahmed Chalabi

BUSH INVITES CHALABI TO STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS...President Bush also met with Chalabi during his brief trip to Iraq last Thanksgiving [White House Documents 1/20/04, 11/27/03]

...BUSH MILITARY ASSISTS IN RAID OF CHALABI'S HOUSE "U.S. soldiers raided the home of America's one-time ally Ahmad Chalabi on Thursday and seized documents and computers." [Washington Post, 5/20/04]

11. Department of Homeland Security

BUSH OPPOSES THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY..."So, creating a Cabinet office doesn't solve the problem. You still will have agencies within the federal government that have to be coordinated. So the answer is that creating a Cabinet post doesn't solve anything." [White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, 3/19/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY "So tonight, I ask the Congress to join me in creating a single, permanent department with an overriding and urgent mission: securing the homeland of America and protecting the American people." [President Bush, Address to the Nation, 6/6/02]

12. Weapons of Mass Destruction

BUSH SAYS WE FOUND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION..."We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories...for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." [President Bush, Interview in Poland, 5/29/03]

...BUSH SAYS WE HAVEN'T FOUND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION "David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. And when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories [sic] as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out." [President Bush, Meet the Press, 2/7/04]

13. Free Trade

BUSH SUPPORTS FREE TRADE... "I believe strongly that if we promote trade, and when we promote trade, it will help workers on both sides of this issue." [President Bush in Peru, 3/23/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS RESTRICTIONS ON TRADE "In a decision largely driven by his political advisers, President Bush set aside his free-trade principles last year and imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel to help out struggling mills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, two states crucial for his reelection." [Washington Post, 9/19/03]

14. Osama Bin Laden

BUSH WANTS OSAMA DEAD OR ALIVE... "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'" [President Bush, on Osama Bin Laden, 09/17/01]

...BUSH DOESN'T CARE ABOUT OSAMA "I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him."[President Bush, Press Conference, 3/13/02]

15. The Environment

BUSH SUPPORTS MANDATORY CAPS ON CARBON DIOXIDE... "[If elected], Governor Bush will work to...establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide." [Bush Environmental Plan, 9/29/00]

...BUSH OPPOSES MANDATORY CAPS ON CARBON DIOXIDE "I do not believe, however, that the government should impose on power plants mandatory emissions reductions for carbon dioxide, which is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." [President Bush, Letter to Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), 3/13/03]

16. WMD Commission

BUSH RESISTS AN OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION ON WMD INTELLIGENCE FAILURE... "The White House immediately turned aside the calls from Kay and many Democrats for an immediate outside investigation, seeking to head off any new wide-ranging election-year inquiry that might go beyond reports already being assembled by congressional committees and the Central Intelligence Agency." [NY Times, 1/29/04]

...BUSH SUPPORTS AN OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION ON WMD INTELLIGENCE FAILURE "Today, by executive order, I am creating an independent commission, chaired by Governor and former Senator Chuck Robb, Judge Laurence Silberman, to look at American intelligence capabilities, especially our intelligence about weapons of mass destruction." [President Bush, 2/6/04]

17. Creation of the 9/11 Commission

BUSH OPPOSES CREATION OF INDEPENDENT 9/11 COMMISSION... "President Bush took a few minutes during his trip to Europe Thursday to voice his opposition to establishing a special commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before Sept. 11." [CBS News, 5/23/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS CREATION OF INDEPENDENT 9/11 COMMISSION "President Bush said today he now supports establishing an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." [ABC News, 09/20/02]

18. Time Extension for 9/11 Commission

BUSH OPPOSES TIME EXTENSION FOR 9/11 COMMISSION... "President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." [Washington Post, 1/19/04]

...BUSH SUPPORTS TIME EXTENSION FOR 9/11 COMMISSION "The White House announced Wednesday its support for a request from the commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks for more time to complete its work." [CNN, 2/4/04]

19. One Hour Limit for 9/11 Commission Testimony

BUSH LIMITS TESTIMONY IN FRONT OF 9/11 COMMISSION TO ONE HOUR... "President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have placed strict limits on the private interviews they will grant to the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that they will meet only with the panel's top two officials and that Mr. Bush will submit to only a single hour of questioning, commission members said Wednesday." [NY Times, 2/26/04]

...BUSH SETS NO TIMELIMIT FOR TESTIMONY "The president's going to answer all of the questions they want to raise. Nobody's watching the clock." [White House spokesman Scott McClellan, 3/10/04]

20. Gay Marriage

BUSH SAYS GAY MARRIAGE IS A STATE ISSUE... "The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's issue like you're trying to get me into." [Gov. George W. Bush on Gay Marriage, Larry King Live, 2/15/00]

...BUSH SUPPORTS CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT BANNING GAY MARRIAGE" Today I call upon the Congress to promptly pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife." [President Bush, 2/24/04]

21. Nation Building

BUSH OPPOSES NATION BUILDING... "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road." [Gov. George W. Bush, 10/3/00]

...BUSH SUPPORTS NATION BUILDING "We will be changing the regime of Iraq, for the good of the Iraqi people." [President Bush, 3/6/03]

22. Saddam/al Qaeda Link

BUSH SAYS IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEEN AL QAEDA AND SADDAM... "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." [President Bush, 9/25/02]

...BUSH SAYS SADDAM HAD NO ROLE IN AL QAEDA PLOT "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11." [President Bush, 9/17/03]

23. U.N. Resolution

BUSH VOWS TO HAVE A UN VOTE NO MATTER WHAT... "No matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when it comes to Saddam." [President Bush 3/6/03]

...BUSH WITHDRAWS REQUEST FOR VOTE "At a National Security Council meeting convened at the White House at 8:55 a.m., Bush finalized the decision to withdraw the resolution from consideration and prepared to deliver an address to the nation that had already been written." [Washington Post, 3/18/03]

24. Involvement in the Palestinian Conflict

BUSH OPPOSES SUMMITS... "Well, we've tried summits in the past, as you may remember. It wasn't all that long ago where a summit was called and nothing happened, and as a result we had significant intifada in the area." [President Bush, 04/05/02]

...BUSH SUPPORTS SUMMITS "If a meeting advances progress toward two states living side by side in peace, I will strongly consider such a meeting. I'm committed to working toward peace in the Middle East." [President Bush, 5/23/03]

25. Campaign Finance

BUSH OPPOSES MCCAIN-FEINGOLD... "George W. Bush opposes McCain-Feingold...as an infringement on free expression." [Washington Post, 3/28/2000]

...BUSH SIGNS MCCAIN-FEINGOLD INTO LAW "[T]his bill improves the current system of financing for Federal campaigns, and therefore I have signed it into law." [President Bush, at the McCain-Feingold signing ceremony, 03/27/02]

26. 527s

BUSH OPPOSES RESTRICTIONS ON 527S... "I also have reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising [in McCain Feingold], which restrains the speech of a wide variety of groups on issues of public import." [President Bush, 3/27/02]

…BUSH SAYS 527S BAD FOR SYSTEM "I don't think we ought to have 527s. I can't be more plain about it…I think they're bad for the system. That's why I signed the bill, McCain-Feingold." [President Bush, 8/23/04]

27. Medical Records

BUSH SAYS MEDICAL RECORDS MUST REMAIN PRIVATE... "I believe that we must protect…the right of every American to have confidence that his or her personal medical records will remain private." [President Bush, 4/12/01]

…BUSH SAYS PATIENTS' HISTORIES ARE NOT CONFIDENTIAL The Justice Department…asserts that patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential." [Business Week, 4/30/04]

28. Timelines For Dictators

BUSH SETS TIMELINE FOR SADDAM... "If Iraq does not accept the terms within a week of passage or fails to disclose required information within 30 days, the resolution authorizes 'all necessary means' to force compliance--in other words, a military attack." [LA Times, 10/3/02]

…BUSH SAYS HE'S AGAINST TIMELINES "I don't think you give timelines to dictators." [President Bush, 8/27/04]

29. The Great Lakes

BUSH WANTS TO DIVERT GREAT LAKES... "Even though experts say 'diverting any water from the Great Lakes region sets a bad precedent' Bush 'said he wants to talk to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about piping water to parched states in the west and southwest.'– [AP, 7/19/01]

...BUSH SAYS HE'LL NEVER DIVERT GREAT LAKES "We've got to use our resources wisely, like water. It starts with keeping the Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes Basin...My position is clear: We're never going to allow diversion of Great Lakes water." [President Bush, 8/16/04]

30. Winning The War On Terror

BUSH CLAIMS HE CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR... "One of the interesting things people ask me, now that we're asking questions, is, can you ever win the war on terror? Of course, you can." [President Bush, 4/13/04]

…BUSH SAYS WAR ON TERROR IS UNWINNABLE "I don't think you can win [the war on terror]." [President Bush, 8/30/04]

…BUSH SAYS HE WILL WIN THE WAR ON TERROR "Make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win [the war on terror]." [President Bush, 8/31/04]

They say the first 1000 hits is the toughest...

Well, I've done it; I've reached 1000 hits. It's smooth sailing from here on out.

What do you mean that Atrios has over 30,000,000 hits? He gets how many per day? 30,000? Holy Crap.

Back to work for me I guess...

Well, they should know...

You know, I just can't help but chuckle when I go to Bush Relatives for Kerry.

What a big bunch of American Hating Terrorists™.

We're in deep Qaqaa now...

Have you ever wondered where all high explosive material for all the car bombs and IEDs in Iraq is coming from? The New York Times has a story about it today.

Josh Marshall has more:

The explosives at al Qa Qaa were one of the primary -- and much-publicized -- concerns of non-proliferation officials at the IAEA and elsewhere prior to the war. During and after the war there was apparently no effort to secure the facility or catalog its remaining contents. Then no one realized there was a problem until more than a year later when someone told Jerry Bremer. But he didn't tell anyone in Washington, or at least no one remembers. And then Condi Rice only found out about it within the last month, but it's not clear she told anyone (i.e., the president or other principals) either.

Don't forget, this is the Administration of Personal Responsibility™ so I'm sure indictments, firings, or admonisments are on their way.

Or maybe not...

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 8 to vote Bush out of office...

I’m certainly no expert on the Social Security program. I’m pretty sure I understand it in very general terms. There are a few sites for which I’ve gone to for information: the Motley Fool, the Congressional Budget Office, and CNN are good ones for starters. What I’ve learned is that depending on how wisely the federal government handles the budget, Social Security will be solvent for a very long time.

It goes something like this. The Social Security taxes that the government collects exceed the current outlays of the Social Security program. The excess funds are put into a Social Security trust fund. According to the SSA, this trust fund is scheduled to be depleted in 2042 due to the number of baby boomers reaching retirement age. However, when the federal budget has a deficit, the government will borrow from the Social Security trust fund. It is this trust fund that everyone liked to scoff at Al Gore about.

Some common reasons that the government will have a deficit include a poor economy, trade deficit, tax cuts, and the costs of waging a war. The Bush administration, unlike the Clinton administration has mastered the art of the budget deficit. In the short 4 year period the Bush administration has pushed the national debt up as far as it has ever been $7.4 trillion when at the end of the Clinton administration we were seeing record surpluses and projections for actually paying down the debt rather than just paying the interest.

So as you can see, as the federal budget goes, so goes Social Security. This administration has made it almost a mission to patently ignore fiscal responsibility and Social Security is in jeopardy because of it. This is exactly why Social Security has become such a hot button issue in this election. Kerry’s plan is sound fiscal responsibility in the government. Bush’s plan is, well he doesn’t have a stated plan.

Well, Bush didn’t have a stated plan. David Corn says it best on AlterNet:

The New York Times has endorsed John Kerry. No surprise there. But its true gift to Kerry was an article that appeared in the paper's magazine on the same day. In the piece, Ron Suskind – the veteran political reporter who did damage to the Bush White House with his book on ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill – reported that last month at a confidential luncheon with big-money supporters (the RNC Regents), Bush said, "I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security." The privatizing of Social Security? Everyone in politics knows a candidate is not supposed to say that. Bush has been trained – with a rolled-up newspaper? – to talk about Social Security "reform," not privatization. Mentioning the P-word is a major slip-up (almost as bad politically – perhaps worse – as invading another country by mistake). As soon as the newspaper hit breakfast tables cross the nation, a Kerry aide e-mailed me a note:

This Social Security privatization stuff from Bush is a huge gift. Huge.

The Kerry campaign has been capitalizing on Bush’s slip up since the debates. The one issue that Kerry brought up at the debate was one issue that factcheck.org brought up:

There are a host of unanswered questions about Bush's intentions regarding Social Security, and the campaign so far hasn't shed much light on any of them. Bush has said he wouldn't increase payroll taxes, but maintaining benefits for current retirees while allowing some portion of current payroll taxes to go into privately owned accounts will cost at least $1 trillion and perhaps much more, depending on what estimates are used. Bush hasn't said where the money would come from.

The people at Fact Check have plenty of problems with both Bush’s and Kerry’s plans for Social Security, and they have even more problems with some of the attack ads, and to be completely fair, I am no where near equipped to answer the issues they bring up.

There are reasons outside of the purely economic issues of funding the Social Security system that need to be addressed though. The first issue is the fact that if you tie in Social Security with the stock market you introduce risk. Social Security is intended to help people in times of need. What other situation would create a time of need more than a stock market collapse? Social Security should be able to help people in need regardless of the performance of the markets. The second issue is how exactly would the government force people to invest in the stock market who are uninterested or unknowledgeable about doing that? It is generally the poorest Americans that have not ever invested in the stock market. Privatizing Social Security would therefore benefit the rich more than the poor; those who need it the least would get the most out of it.

There are problems with Social Security, but not all of those problems are intrinsic to the Social Security program itself. With sound fiscal discipline in the government comes Social Security solvency. With privatization comes risk and undue burden on those who need it. The Bush administration has shown that it is not in any way interested in fiscal discipline and has said that he will waste no time in privatizing the Social Security system. For these reasons, Bush does not deserve to be re-elected.

Time to start keeping an eye on the lawsuits surrounding the election...

Well we have a week an a day to go until the election. Thanks to the Supreme Court, we now get to look forward to months of lawsuits and trials before we learn exactly who the winner is. The Election Law blog has all the details on all the law issues of this election. More importantly, Rick informs us of not only alleged fraud but what charges are valid and what charges are without merit.

Unfortunately, this site will be popular until long after the election is over I think...

Faithbased Watch

Reason number 10 to vote Bush out was because of his Faith-based initiatives. I wish I would have known about this site before I wrote that. You can keep track of exactly how Bush's faith-based initiatives are affecting our country by venturing on over to Media Transparency's Faithbased Watch. I will be perma-linking this over to the right shortly.

10 days 10 reasons: Reason # 9 to vote Bush out of office...

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. – Benjamin Franklin

"There is no doubt," he declared on the Senate floor that evening, "that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where the police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the government was entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications . . . the government would probably discover and arrest more terrorists, or would-be terrorists . . . But that would not be a country in which we would want to live." – Senator Russell Feingold (the lone dissenter against the USA PATRIOT Act that was rammed through the Senate and passed 96 to 1)

The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act is an ironically named act that is the direct result of the work of John Ashcroft and the Bush Administration. According to the Washington Post, in the six weeks after September 11, 2001, the administration hawks led by John Ashcroft had negotiated a deal with Senator Leahy (known in Washington to be a staunch civil libertarian) on a bill that would better enable the Government to combat terrorism while still preserving the civil liberties of all Americans. At the 11th hour, after Ashcroft, Leahy, and others had agreed upon this measure, Ashcroft met with Leahy and informed him that he wanted more and the deal was off.

Following that meeting, Ashcroft held a press conference and told the American people that he was distressed with the slow speed at which the counter-terrorism bill was going through the legislative process. Ashcroft, at the meeting he just had with Leahy, had now taken the initiative and within 17 days a whole new bill, the USA PATRIOT Act, had been introduced into and passed by both the House and Senate. This new bill included everything that Ashcroft wanted and passed by stunning margins of both Republicans and Democrats who, realistically at the time, felt that they would be portrayed as soft on terrorism if they didn’t support the bill. The only provision of the bill that the Democrats managed to work in was the sunset provision; the USA PATRIOT Act would have to pass the House and Senate again in 2005.

It has become standard for this Administration to write bills in secret then ram them through the Congress by using intimidation or in some cases bribery to get those bills passed. In the days immediately after September 11th, the Administration used the threat of terrorism and the never before seen national unity to push its agenda on the nation. Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder with Republicans on just about everything in those weeks and months (or the vast majority of them did) but not always because they thought that everything they were doing was the right thing to do. That is how the bill passed and that is how the sunset provision got in it.

The legislative history of the USA PATRIOT Act is distressing, but it is its content and the potential misuse and actual misuse of the law that has caused the most uproar. One example is the case of Jose Padilla. Jose Padilla is a Chicago gang member who has been held at a Navy brig in South Carolina because he is suspected to have worked with al Qaeda to set off a “dirty bomb”. No charges have been filed, Padilla does not have access to an attorney, and he has not been given due process of the law. John Ashcroft said this about the Jose Padilla case: "In determining that [Jose Padilla] is an enemy combatant who legally can be detained by the United States military, we have acted with legal authority both under the laws of war and clear Supreme Court precedent." [Source: DOD transcript]. But according to the U.S. Second Circuit Court, "Based on the text of the Constitution and the cases interpreting it, we reject that the President has inherent constitutional power to detain Padilla under the circumstances presented here." - U.S. Second Circuit Court, 12/18/03

Then there is the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. According to CNN:

Before his arrest, al-Marri -- a Qatari national -- was attending graduate school at Bradley University in Illinois. Originally, the government held him on a "material witness" warrant. Then it charged him with making false statements. Less than a month before al-Marri's trial, the government dropped its charges against him, and declared him an "enemy combatant."

Few people know that the government sought to have al-Marri's criminal case dismissed without prejudice -- that is, without losing the government's ability to choose later to re-indict him in a civilian criminal court. But that tactic failed.

After designating al-Marri an enemy combatant, the government held him incommunicado in a South Carolina military prison -- where Padilla is being held.

Al-Marri's attorneys challenged his detention in Illinois. But the government argues that his habeas corpus petition should have been filed in South Carolina, where the government incarcerated him. As noted above, this is the same argument the government successfully made with respect to Jose Padilla -- as reflected in the Padilla v. Rumsfeld decision.

And I found this on the ACLU website:

The ACLU’s concern peaked over the 2004 New Year's holiday when the Las Vegas Review-Journal confirmed that the FBI had ham-handedly used so-called “national security letters” to seize the travel and hotel records of over 300,000 visitors to the city. The bureau did so without any actual intelligence suggesting an imminent attack in Las Vegas. National security letter authority was expanded by the Patriot Act and a 2003 intelligence spending bill to allow agents to seize credit, business and communications records without the assent of a judge or grand jury, let alone a showing of criminal probable cause.

…

The ACLU e-mail actually said that because the Patriot Act was being implemented under the strictest secrecy, no outside group could know whether the law was being abused. It also noted that at the press conference introducing a bill to narrow parts of the Patriot Act, original co-sponsor Larry Craig, a conservative Republican Senator from Idaho, said the potential for abuse was an entirely legitimate reason for reform.

What is important to note is that even if there were no direct examples of misuse of the USA PATRIOT Act, if you ignore the examples I’ve just given, the potential for misuse exists. In fact in September of this year, a federal district judge in New York ruled that a key component of the USA PATRIOT Act is unconstitutional. The ruling struck down the broad rights that the act gives the government to spy on conversations on the internet because it would limit people’s right to free speech. To see exactly how other provisions could be misused read this pamphlet by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.

What could be more disturbing than the USA PATRIOT Act? The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, that’s what. This classified bill, dubbed the Patriot Act II, was leaked to the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan think tank, who then released it out to the public. This “sweeping expansion of the anti-terrorism act” has expanded some of the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act to Orwellian extremes and has made the already broad first act a great deal broader and has made it more likely that the Government will abuse the laws. Not surprisingly, given the political atmosphere now and given the fact that many Congressmen and Senators who passed a bill in 2001 that they weren’t allowed to read, the Patriot Act II has met with stiff resistance. According to Wired.com (another article here) though, the Patriot Act II is being passed a la carte as riders on other bills.

While the nation was distracted last month by images of Saddam Hussein's spider hole and dental exam, President George W. Bush quietly signed into law a new bill that gives the FBI increased surveillance powers and dramatically expands the reach of the USA Patriot Act.

The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004 grants the FBI unprecedented power to obtain records from financial institutions without requiring permission from a judge.

Under the law, the FBI does not need to seek a court order to access such records, nor does it need to prove just cause.

Previously, under the Patriot Act, the FBI had to submit subpoena requests to a federal judge. Intelligence agencies and the Treasury Department, however, could obtain some financial data from banks, credit unions and other financial institutions without a court order or grand jury subpoena if they had the approval of a senior government official.

The new law (see Section 374 of the act), however, lets the FBI acquire these records through an administrative procedure whereby an FBI field agent simply drafts a so-called national security letter stating the information is relevant to a national security investigation.

And the law broadens the definition of "financial institution" to include such businesses as insurance companies, travel agencies, real estate agents, stockbrokers, the U.S. Postal Service and even jewelry stores, casinos and car dealerships.

The law also prohibits subpoenaed businesses from revealing to anyone, including customers who may be under investigation, that the government has requested records of their transactions.

Bush signed the bill on Dec. 13, a Saturday, which was the same day the U.S. military captured Saddam Hussein.

The USA PATRIOT Act and the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 (either passed in entirety or piece by piece) are shining examples of the Bush Administration’s complete disregard for the civil liberties of the people of the United States. Despite what pundits like Ann Coulter (who has denied any misuse of the USA PATRIOT Act and who constantly refers to liberals as terrorists or enemies) or Michelle Malkin (who wrote a book defending the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor) say, the USA PATRIOT Act has been misused and it has great potential to be further misused. Ask yourself one question, do you trust the Government enough to give them the blanket powers found in the USA PATRIOT Act? Do you trust that the Government will not overstep its bounds if given an opportunity? If your answer was no to either of these questions, then it only makes sense for you to vote for John Kerry who is for limiting the USA PATRIOT Act and ensuring civil liberties (in much the same way the Leahy made compromises with the DOJ to ensure that the government had the tools it needed and didn’t overstep the bounds of the Constitution) and against George Bush who is in favor of not only eliminating the sunset provision but also passing entirely new provisions of the PATRIOT Act II.

Just because I'm blocked doesn't mean you should be...

So as I've been here, the webpage blocking policies have gradually become more and more restrictive. Most of the stuff that I want to get at is still good to go, but if anyone wanted to do Ebay they're out of luck I hear. Any "web hosting" is blocked which is the only thing that sucks for me. Whenever I look at my blog, I don't see any pictures because my image host is blocked. I can upload my pictures via FTP, but I can't access anything from home.comcast.net. So wierd. Fortunately it isn't blocked over at the internet cafe, so I go over there every once in a while to check to make sure everything's kosher. If you happen to notice anything, give me a shout will you?

So anyhow, the point of all of this is that, oddly enough, some of the blogs of the people that comment on this site are blocked for me which means that I can't get to see them on any kind of regular basis (even though they are on the PBA links at the right). I did get the chance to take a look at them when I was at the internet cafe last time and it appeared that they were worth a look-see. The first is Cyndy from Mouse Musings. I've been seeing hits from her site ever since I did the whole blogexplosion thing. Another regular since my blogexplosion stuff is Diana from Democracy for California. I wish I could visit them daily, but I can't.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't...

10 days 10 reasons not to vote for Bush...

Well there are 10 days left until the most important election of my lifetime. Obviously I know that this blog will have the same reach as other blogs like Atrios or Kos or other websites like Cursor or MoveOn, but as Moby said recently, "My great fear is that we will wake up on November 3rd, George Bush will have won and we will say, 'What more could we have done?'". This blog is what I have, it is my sounding board, and it is how I'm trying to make a difference.

That is why I have decided to compile 10 compelling reasons to vote Bush out of office on November 2nd. If I would have read No Logo before the 2000 election, I would have voted for Nader. After the Florida debacle, I would have begun to realize what a big mistake that was. What I have learned in the 4 years since is that our system is inherently flawed and we only have two real choices. There is a difference between Republican and Democrat candidates, not as much as I would like, but it's all we've got ... for now. My point is that this year it is important not to forget the lessons of 2000; a vote for Nader is not a vote against Bush. The 10 reasons that I will post in the next 10 days will hopefully inspire you to understand the difference among the candidates and make you want to support Kerry.

Without further ado...

Reason Number 10 to vote Bush out of office: His Faith-Based Initiatives

What if I told you that the Congress of the United States had unanimously passed a resolution that contained the following phrase "the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion"? What if I told you the President of the United States then signed that resolution into law? Would you believe me?

Now, what if I told you that resolution was initiated under George Washington and ratified by John Adams less than a decade after the Constitution of the United States was completed? That would mean that this phrase, "the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion," was written, passed unanimously, and ratified by either the founding fathers or those who had first-hand knowledge of the founding fathers' intent. Would you believe me?

That story is in fact entirely true. The resolution was the Treaty with Tripoli and it was initiated under Washington, passed unanimously by the Congress on June 7th, 1797 and ratified by John Adams on June 10th, 1797. Among many other historical facts, this one stands out as the clearest statement of intent of those who founded the government of the United States of America. The founding fathers did not base our government on religion, rather they set up a system of government that, for the first time ever, was completely secular so that the people were free to practice (or not) as they saw fit.

Bush's faith-based initiatives go directly against the intent of the founding fathers. The government is supposed to support and represent all of its citizens equally. Furthermore, the government is supposed to allow people to practice their religion as they see fit or feel free to not practice any religion at all. By funding faith-based organizations, the government creates a Catch 22. In the case the now government-sponsored faith-based organizations choose to help only those people who share their religious convictions or who agree to be taught about that religion in order to receive help, we would then have government sponsored religious discrimination. In this case the policy would exclude certain portions of the population. In the case that the government recognizes that problem and decides to give funding contingent upon setting strict guidelines about how faith-based organizations can operate and to whom they must give help you have the government dictating how a religious organization is run thereby violating that organization's freedom of religion.

In this case, these are the only two options. Realistically, the issue is that the Bush administration is interested in dismantling the welfare state. Suffice it to say that this administration has decided not to give faith-based organizations any guidelines so their faith-based initiatives amount to state sponsored discrimination.

Any President who sponsors discrimination should be voted out of office.

Friday lyrics blogging...

Well, where I am, it's Friday, and that means it's time for Friday lyrics blogging!

Have you ever been casually listening to a song and the meaning of the lyrics hits you like a ton of bricks? Well it happened to me this morning. It isn't that I was totally unaware of what the lyrics of Radiohead's 2+2=5 mean, I did know that 2+2=5 is a reference to Orwell's 1984, that the "hail to the theif" lyric references the ironic chant for Bush after the 2000 election, and that the lyric "don't feel like payin attention" deals with some kind of apathy.

What didn't occur to me was that Thom Yorke (the lead singer of Radiohead) is narrating from the point of view of an apathetic young American voter -- or more precisecly, an apathetic youn American who chose not to vote.

Radiohead - 2+2=5 (the Lukewarm)

Are you such a dreamer
To put the world to rights?

I'll stay home forever
Where two and two always makes five

I'll lay down the tracks
Sandbag and hide

January has April's showers
And two and two always makes five

It's the devil's way now
There is no way out
You can scream and you can shout
It is too late now

Because!
You have not been
Payin' attention
Payin' attention
Payin' attention
Payin' attention
You have not be-en
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
you have not been
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
You have no-t been
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention
Payin’ attention

I try to sing along
But the music's all wrong
'Cause I’m not
'Cause I’m not
I swat 'em like flies but like flies the buggers keep coming back and NOT
But I’m not
All hail to the thief
All hail to the thief
But I'm not
But I'm not
But I'm not
But I'm not
Don't question my authority or put me in the dock
'Cause I'm not
'Cause I'm not
Oh go and tell the king that the sky is falling in
When it's not
But it's not
But it's not
Maybe not
Maybe not

If you take this from the view of the apathetic non-voter, and consider all the protests during the late 90s (like the 99 World Bank protests in Seattle) you begin to understand the first section: "Are you such a dreamer to put the world to rights? I'll stay home forever where 2 and 2 always makes a 5. I'll lay down the tracks sandbag and hide. January has April's showers, and 2 and 2 always makes a 5." The narrator asks if you're the type that wants to change the world, he just wants to stay home where we get instructed that things we know are false are actually true. I think that "I'll lay down the tracks" is a metaphor meaning that the only thing the narrator will do is make it possible for the machine (in this case, I think its the media or perhaps the government itself) to reach him. He's going to hunker down in his comfort zone (surrounded by sandbags). But he can't help notice that "January has April's showers", which is to say that something is noticeably wrong (i.e. Bush is sworn into office in January) and that he keeps getting told that something he knows to be false, is in fact true.

The next section "It's the Devil's way now. There is no way out. You can scream and you can shout. It's too late now," is the most obviously anti-Bush line in the song. In this case, Yorke has gone from being the apathetic non-voter to being the one who is yelling at that voter to chastize him. The Devil is the metaphor for Bush, and now that he's elected (no thanks to you) there's no amount of yelling or screaming that is going to make a difference. That is to say, you should have made a difference when you could, at the voting booth. But no, you didn't feel like paying attention. That is where the song gets much louder and faster.

The final part seems to be from the perspective from the formerly apathetic voter again. When he says "I try to sing along but the music's all wrong" makes sense. He tries to remain apathetic, but what he's being told just doesn't make any sense. He wants to be apathetic, but the contradictions are following him like flies that won't leave (an allusion to the Lord of the Flies perhaps?). He chants the line All Hail to the Theif twice as if he's beginning to understand, but he isn't quite there yet. One definition of the word Dock is an enclosure in a court of law where the defendant sits during the trial, so the "Don't question my authority or put me in the Dock" seems to be from the view of Bush regarding his view on the lawsuit filed by Gore. I'm a little confused by the "Go and tell the king that the sky is falling in" line. It's obviously from chicken little. It may be referring to how Gore was announced the winner of the election and suggesting (as others have) that there was something funny that went on to have Bush declared the winner.

The song doesn't end on much of a positive tone does it. Even with all of this knowledge, he says maybe not as in maybe what I'm being told isn't a lie. How easy it is to forget.

Picture friday!

I'm having so much fun posting pictures, I thought I'd post a whole hell of a lot more of them! I forgot that one of the guys I was with when I left base for about a week (remember?) had a digital camera with him. So it was a welcomed surprise when he emailed me the copies of the pictures. I have cropped them to fit, but linked them to the full sized pictures if you're interested.

Enjoy!

This is where I spent part of my time when I was gone...

These are some of the Army guys I was working with...

Here's me hard at work doing something entirely new to me...

Here's me ... um ... scratching my nose...

Here's why I was there...

An old worn out Iraqi Mig 21, me, and my M4 (the new replacement for the M16)...

More me on a Mig, this time a close up!

Me, on a Mig ... again...

Hey guys, let's take a picture by the Mig!

Hey, I have a great idea, I heard there's a Mig around here, lets go find it...

Pie Chart from Hell...

Well, we're starting to see real progress in the PCfH this week. I'm also experimenting some more with Photoshop layers. I have just recently learned how to do a clipping layer which is why the Tacoma photo portion of the PCfH is no longer deformed. Yay! Let's have a look shall we?



More excitement to come!

It's funny because it's true...

It's also sad and aggrivating. Here's how the liberal media works: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=17893

Another email forward to refute...

This one wasn't sent to me directly, but it was forwarded to me with the knowledge, I suspect, that I have a tendency of refuting these sorts of things. This forward is an exercise in rewriting history and just plain lying. I'm going to quote the email, then refute each statement. Feel free to follow along.

This e-mail comes to you with no intention of offending anyone. I found it very interesting and thought it worthy of passing it on. Maves

Check this out and explain to me why anyone would vote for Kerry.

I'm trying to get all this political stuff straightened out in my head so I'll know how to vote come November. Right now, we have one guy saying one thing. Then the other guy says something else. Who to believe. Lemme see; have I got this straight?

Ahh... The classic start to an unbiased email.

Clinton awards Halliburton no-bid contract in Yugoslavia - good...
Bush awards Halliburton no-bid contract in Iraq - bad...

First off, I can't find one single unbiased news source that can verify that Clinton actually did use Halliburton. There are LOTs of ultra right blogs that use this email as a source, but that's hardly independent verification. Furthermore, I had no idea that Clinton was even running in this election. Of course, to the author of this email, a dem is a dem is a dem and as we all know, liberals are BAAAAAAAD! But what could be the difference here? What could it be? Was it Gore that was CEO of Halliburton, who owned stock in Halliburton at the time of the contract, and looked the other way when they did their price gouging. Oh no wait, that is Cheney. It is Cheney who still holds Halliburton stocks, and it is Cheney who has a conflict of interest. The issue is not so much Halliburton (which owns KBR which I can verify does a great job around here - although they have been implicated in scandals elsewhere) as it is war profiteering.

Clinton spends 77 billion on war in Serbia - good..
Bush spends 87 billion in Iraq - bad...

Hello? Is anyone paying attention out there? The $87 billion was an emergency appropriation to fund fun novelties like body armor and armor for HMMWVs that Bush sent the troops to Iraq without. Even if you use Cheney's estimate that he gave at the debate, the war has cost $120 billion ... SO FAR. Other estimates put the total somewhere closer to $200 billion thus far. But let's look at other costs, as of the time I write this, 1102 US troops killed, between 13000 and 15000 Iraqis killed, and absolutely no end in sight. Sure, $77 billion is a lot, but $120 billion to $200 billion and growing plus an average of 2.13 coalition troops dying PER DAY is far more.

Clinton imposes regime change in Serbia - good...
Bush imposes regime change in Iraq - bad...

Yup, no difference in Bosnia and Iraq, none at all. Well maybe just this from CNN: "The civil war among Bosnia's Muslim, Croat and Serb populations was Europe's bloodiest conflict since the end of World War II, and Dean said the United States risked its moral credibility if it did not take action there. Eventually, NATO did launch airstrikes against Serb forces besieging the capital, Sarajevo, and a U.S.-brokered peace treaty was signed later that year." Stopping genocide was the reason for the US war in Yugoslavia from day one until the end of that war. Just because the outcome was similar doesn't mean that both wars were justified.

Clinton bombs Christian Serbs on behalf of Muslim Albanian terrorists-good...
Bush liberates 25 million from a genocidal dictator - bad...

Interesting how this line item has racism and religious pandering at its core. Clinton bombed Christians not people committing genocide. What's worse, Clinton bombed Christians to gasp help Muslims! The gall! According to the author it was Bush that saved millions of Chrstians from a genocidal madman. Help me out, am I the only one who sees the logical fallacy here? This is an appeal to emotion of the crassest sense. If one is concerned about genocide, you will get no clearer example than Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Congo. I don't recall Bush being interesting in stopping the genocide in the Congo (similarly Clinton wasn't all that interested in Rwanda). The Iraq war wasn't about stopping genocide, Saddam was powerless in the vast majority of Iraq due to the sanctions and the no-fly zones.

Clinton bombs Chinese embassy - good...
Bush bombs terrorist camps - bad...

The author must have some kind of TS clearance and a need to know because if we actually did intentionally bomb the Chinese Embassy, there is no way anyone is going to admit it. We've all heard things. The most popular rumor I've heard is that the Chinese had highly sensitive parts of the recently shot down F-117 stealth that they were being held in the embassy. Assuming that is true (and there's zero evidence that indicates that it is) would it have been A-OK for the Chinese to have gotten state secrets that would have increased their ability to fight us?

Also, when did Bill Clinton, oh no wait I mean John Kerry (he's the one running for President remember?) say it was bad to bomb terrorist camps? The last time that I heard anyone say that it was bad to bomb terrorist camps was when all those on the right said that Clinton was just bombing terrorist camps to take attention off of the Monica scandal. Here's the thing, Clinton was going after Osama Bin Laden, but Republicans thought that wasn't as important as finding out who he was boffing.

Clinton commits felonies while in office - good...
Bush lands on aircraft carrier in jumpsuit - bad...

Clinton lies about a BJ: Worst. Thing. Ever. Bush lies about Iraq's ability to produce WMD and his reasons for going to war, goes to war without a plan to end the war, and takes focus off of those who killed over 3000 Americans: Best. President. Ever. Let's not forget that when the Steely Eyed Rocket Man landed on that carrier, he also said "Mission Accomplished". Tell that to the troops that have been here for over a year once and are back on the 2nd year-long tour.

No mass graves found in Serbia - good...
No WMD found Iraq - bad...

No mass graves? Really? Not here, here, here, here, here, or here? This is one of this email's outright lies. There have been tens of thousands of bodies found in mass graves in Bosnia and all it would take is a quick Google search to find that out.

The author gets one thing right, no WMD - Bad.

Stock market crashes in 2000 under Clinton - good...
Economy on upswing under Bush - bad...

Stock market crashes under Clinton? Maybe this is all just a big joke email, it's supposed to be comical. Let's take a look at a graph shall we?



Lookie there. The Stock Market under Clinton eploded to never before seen heights in the 1990s. Sure after the tech bubble burst in the late 1990s, it leveled out, but thanks to Clinton's policies (some of which I don't agree with -- i.e. NAFTA) the market didn't crash. Sure 9/11 had a big impact, but it wasn't Bush's policies that caused it to go back where it was, it was what's known as a rebound. Take a look to the right side of the rebound and the following graph is what you'll find:



But it must be Clinton's fault right? The buck stops somewhere over there. Somewhere far, far away for the "Personal Responsibility" President.

Clinton refuses to take custody of Bin Laden - good...
World Trade Centers fall under Bush - bad...

Things are rarely ever as easy as they are made out to be in emails like this. The Washington Post discusses this issue in great detail. Clinton very much wanted to take bin Laden into custody but we did not have enough evidence to indict him at the time and they were unable to get the Saudis to accept Bin Laden at the time. According to the Clinton administration, there was simply nothing they could have done to make it happen. Don't forget that bin Laden was only suspected of various things at the time and this was in 1996 and WAY before any Republican lawmaker (or media mogul) saw bin Laden as a legitimate threat.

And again, when Clinton did attack Bin Laden, everyone on the right went crazy claiming that he was wagging the dog. Oh and let's not forget that Clinton is NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!

Clinton says Saddam has nukes - good...
Bush says Saddam has nukes - bad...

Clinton thought Iraq had WMDs so he attacked Iraq's ability to make WMDs. When Bush pulled the inspectors out, he removed the only way of knowing for certain that Iraq had WMDs. Bush wasn't interested in the truth, he was only interested in attacking Iraq and the WMD issue was how he made his case. And it is the sword of the WMDs that he is trying desperately to avoid falling on. Oh and one other thing: Clinton is NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!

Clinton calls for regime change in Iraq - good...
Bush imposes regime change in Iraq - bad...

There are ways to do things, Bush chose the wrong way. Bush's way has cost us dearly and there is no end in sight. Oh and there's something else, Clinton is NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!

Terrorist training in Afghanistan under Clinton - good...
Bush destroys training camps in Afghanistan - bad...

I'd personally like to see one instance where anyone ever said that "Terrorist training in Afghanistan was a good thing". The closest thing that I can find is the Republican reaction to Clinton's cruise missile strike on terrorist training camps in Afghanistan: Wagging the Dog, distracting us from the Monica scandal. And who is saying that invading Afghanistan was a bad thing? Oh yeah: Clinton is NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!

Milosevic not yet convicted - good...
Saddam turned over for trial - bad...

Osama bin Laden free to do what he wants - Good, Bush not mentioning bin Laden one single time in months - Good. Chimpus Unelectus diverting attention from those who attacked us - Good. Quagmire in Iraq - Good. Oh and at least Milosevic is on trial, so far, Bin Laden hasn't even been arrested for masterminding the killing of over 3000 Americans.

Ahh, it's so confusing!

Only if you don't read the news and if you remember who is actually running for President. Keep in mind that it is George Bush vs. John Kerry not Bill Clinton. But if you think that Dear Leader can stand up against Clinton's economic record, click on one of the graphs above.

Recently, John Kerry gave a speech in which he claimed Americans are actually paying more taxes under Bush, despite the tax cuts. He gave no explanation and provided no data for this claim.

Kerry is stretching the truth here and I will hold him responsible. Factcheck.org has this to say: "Those in the middle 20% now pay an average of 14.5% of their income for all federal taxes, a reduction 1.9 percentage points as a result of the Bush cuts. That middle group pays 10.5% of the reduced overall federal tax burden. That share has gone up as the Kerry ad says -- by 2/10ths of one percentage point." Factually accurate, but misleading. But Bush has never mislead us right? Not here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc. ad nausem.

Another interesting fact: Both George Bush and John Kerry are wealthy men. Bush owns only one home, his ranch in Texas. Kerry owns four mansions, all worth several million dollars. (His ski resort home in Idaho is an old barn brought over from Europe in pieces. Not your average A-frame). Bush paid $250,000 in taxes this year; Kerry paid $90,000. Does that sound right? The man who wants to raise your taxes obviously has figured

out a way to avoid paying his own.

"President and Mrs. George W. Bush reported taxable income of $727,083 for the tax year 2003. This resulted in a total of $227,490 in federal income taxes.." 31% http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-4.html

"Due to an accounting error, Senator John Kerry filed an amended 2003 return on April 15, 2004. Sen. Kerry paid $102,152 in federal income taxes for 2003 on adjusted gross income of $395,338." 26% http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0416a.html

Bush's site says "taxable income", Kerry's says "adjusted gross income". "Taxable income" (Form 1040, line 40) is the amount of income left after all adjustments, deductions and exemptions are taken. It is the figure on which the tax is calculated. "Adjusted gross income" (Form 104, line 34) is the amount before deductions and exemptions are taken. It is not the figure on which the tax is calculated. Unless there is an error in the wording of the disclosure information, the two percentages I calculated are not based on the same information. If Bush's report had been for his adjusted gross income, the "income" figure would be higher and the percentage paid in taxes lower.

Same thing for Cheney:"The income tax return shows that the Cheneys owe federal taxes for 2003 of $253,067 on taxable income of $813,226." 31% http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-5.html

BTW: The Kerrys file separate returns as is their right.

Of course another way to get out of your tax burden is to pass tax cuts that are targeted mostly toward the richest people in the US. Of course that doesn't help the rest of us out any. Can you say "Voodoo Economics"?

You want the truth about a candidate? Go to Factcheck.org. Make your decision based on reality not on a forwarded email.

All your pottery needs can be fulfilled...

Now that I'm getting more traffic (it's all relative of course), I wanted to give my brother James another plug for his site Miller Pottery. The site is mostly for him to show off his pottery creations and have a little fun, but he isn't afraid to make a sale. He is very talented and does all of the pottery right in his garage -- he even has his own kiln. Like anyone, I've seen tons of pottery in my lifetime and compared to what James can do, it was all crap. Seriously, James has the best pottery designs and does the best, most artistic glazing that I've ever seen.

If you like pottery, would like to have a pot made to fit your exact needs, or want to support an independent artist, please consider heading over to James's site.

Who am I to argue with Col (ret) David Hackworth?

Retrieved from Cursor who got it from King of Zembla. This is what Col (ret) David Hackworth recommends we do in this war on terror. It certainly doesn't sound like he's talking to the current President.

Memo for the President-Elect

By David H. Hackworth

Since our commander-in-chief announced “mission accomplished” on May 1, 2003, the insurgents have seized the initiative in Iraq. And we’re also not winning the even-more-consequential worldwide battle against the Islamic jihadists. All because our forces are trying to do too much with too little the wrong way.

Lately, I’ve been shoveling through literally truckloads of reader queries along the lines of “OK, Hack, you spent most of the past two years griping, so what’s your solution?” It’s a question that needs an answer. So, as a long-term student of insurgent warfare and a soldier who’s fought guerrillas in post-World-War-II Italy, during the Korean War and for more than four years in Vietnam, here’s what I would do:

* Immediately fire SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, all of his Pentagon senior civilian assistants and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers.

* Replace Rumsfeld with retired Gen. Anthony Zinni and give this tough, smart, proven leader a free hand to bring in the best people to reshape and streamline our armed forces for the long counterinsurgency fight ahead.

* Fire National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and replace her with retired Gens. Wes Clark or John Sheehan.

* Establish a military objective – an often-neglected Principle of War – that will include: how the U.S. is going to regain the lost initiative (another neglected Principle of War) and how we’re going to take and hold the turf seized by insurgents; how we will then win the Iraqi people to our side in the fight against the insurgents; how the nascent Iraqi defense shield will eventually replace our forces; and a detailed, coherent exit plan.

* Force our coalition partners in Iraq to either move out of the safety of their forts and start participating in the campaign or go home. So far, they’ve added little to the fight except providing an opportunity for politicos to crow about the unity of a coalition in which we’re doing almost all the heavy lifting.

* Replace our conventional-thinking generals in Iraq and in other hot spots with leaders – preferably Special Forces – who understand the nature of insurgency, and leave them in place until we execute our exit plan.

* Double and then triple the size of our forces in Afghanistan – or we’ll soon be following in the Soviets’ loser boot-steps. This is one of the main events in our global fight with insurgents and should receive top priority.

* Establish a comprehensive course on counterinsurgency warfare that every commander from lieutenant to general would be required to pass, culminating in a butt-busting final exam certifying that graduates have qualified for counterinsurgency warfare at their particular level. A fail would mean immediate discharge.

* Toughen boot-camp standards for all soldiers and make them as realistic, demanding and disciplined as those sweated through by past generations. Then maintain this level throughout the regular and Reserve forces.

* Merge the Army National Guard and Reserve forces into one formation modeled after the Marine Corps Reserves but configured for the post-Cold War fight against international insurgency.

* Provide the states with limited funds to establish a light infantry/military police/state militia force for emergencies such as fires and storms, and for Homeland Defense missions.

* Reorganize the Army from A to Z, starting with doubling the size of Special Ops Forces and maneuver units, gutting the Cold War stuff and adding more civil-affairs, psych-war and military-police units. Deep-six the folks who excel in PowerPoint briefings but add nothing to the critical missions at hand, beginning with the pernicious, pervasive Pentagon blubber and working down to brigade level.

* Overhaul the Army’s antique personnel system, which has fostered the current corrosive corporate general officer system that’s made many officers and senior NCOs careerists rather than two-fisted leaders. Use Maj. Donald Vandergriff’s book, The Path to Victory, as a primer for this desperately needed reform.

* Reduce or scrap most of the multibillion-dollar porker programs such as Star Wars II, and spike orders for platinum-plated Cold War II ships and aircraft. Then use the funds to arm and equip our warriors appropriately.

* Make every military leader from buck sergeant to four-star memorize Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and Imperial Hubris, by “Anonymous.”

That’s, of course, for openers .…

--Eilhys England contributed to this column.

Col. David H. Hackworth (USA Ret.) is SFTT.org co-founder and Senior Military Columnist for DefenseWatch magazine. For information on his many books, go to his home page at Hackworth.com, where you can sign in for his free weekly Defending America. Send mail to P.O. Box 11179, Greenwich, CT 06831. His newest book is “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts.” © 2004 David H. Hackworth. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.

Howard Zinn has a point...

Something to think about.

Since war is itself the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory. Is it strange, or normal, that no major political figure has pointed this out

I found this and a whole lot more on a new friend of at ease, Ratboy's Anvil which has found a home on my growing links list. Go and take a look.

A picture of me at the Cobra Gold '04 exercise in Thailand...

Someone recently posted on another blog's comments that in his professional ex-military opinion, I don't use the dialect or the nomenclature of someone who has military experience. He doubted that I am in the military at all. To him I only have this to say:



Suck it.

This is a picture of me in uniform at Cobra Gold in Thailand in the sweltering month of May. Next to me is a Thai Major who was working in the C4 right next to me. Notice the flight suit I'm wearing. Notice the name tag that says "Michael R. Lane" notice the navigator wings on the name tag, and notice that the face is the same as the face in the "about me" box on your right.

Today's public service announcement...

Here's a big word for today: dehumanization.

That's when you go out with someone only for their appearance - their big pecs or long legs. When you are interested in someone only on the basis of physique, you're dehumanizing him or her, seeing that person only as an attractive object. If you are doing that, remember, good sex occurs between two human beings, not between two objects ...

Are you surprised by my thoughts on the subject? Did you think that O'Reilly would tell you sex is off-limits? As you know, things are more complicated than that. But I repeat my mantra: Sex is best when you combine sensible behavior with sincere affection ...

It is also smart to recognize that there is no area more potentially dishonest than the sexual arena."And if you exploit a girl, it will come back to get you.

Quoted from Bill O'Reilly's Book "The O'Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America's Kids."

You know, I heard that Bill O'Reilly had some other things to say about sex recently. Take this, this, or this for instance. The good citizens at Fark have some other O'Reilly book title ideas. Our friends at Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly have more fun stuff.

Man, I feel like having a falafel right now for some reason.

Best Photos of 2004

I just got emailed a link to a site that has what someone deemed Best Photos of 2004. After looking at it, I must say, I definitely agree with them, these are, in fact, the best photos that I have seen this year. As a budding photographer, or at least a potentially budding photographer since I don't have my Canon EOS 20D just yet, I absolutely love these photos. I find myself thinking about what shutter and exposure settings -- in a general sense -- the photographer used. The hummingbird was an extremely fast shutter speed and it looks like a fairly large apeture setting. The boy diving into the leaves used a large apeture setting and a touch of zoom (notice the depth of field). And so on...

Swerve Left

I want to give a big shout out to Karlo over at Swerve Left. His very much appreciated blog post about at ease has given this site the single largest jump in traffic since I started this site in July. I must admit that I haven't read much of his site just yet, but what I have read appears to be logical, well reasoned, and well written. Do yourself a favor and go check it out.

I'm doing lots of writing right now...

Unfortunately, none of it is actually being posted to the blog. I'm writing my 10 days, 10 reasons not to vote for Bush posts. I'm trying to make the 10 reasons detailed and I'm trying to not be too partisan; the former is fairly easy, the latter is a challenge. I want to show why Bush does not deserve your vote without resorting to saying "he's stupid" or "Republicans are evil" or some other easily ignored nonsense. If my arguments are strong and logical and not insulting trash, they will be much more convincing.

I'm learning new things, and I'm finding that my memory is pretty darned good. There have been a couple of times that I remembered some little tid-bit of information and was able to find it after a diligent search. Yay!

Anyhow, just wanted to post that things are going just fine and that you'll have plenty of reading material starting in 5 days.

Go and tell the king that the sky is falling in...

Some time back, my first week or so here, I was talking to Beth on the phone. She hadn’t left for her deployment yet and was spending the night at Brother Dave’s (Hi Dave!). At one point during the conversation one of Dave’s roommates, Dave P., asked a question that I couldn’t answer at the time and I have been thinking about ever since.

What do the troops on the ground feel about the war?

Now, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I am not one that will pass quick judgment on something. Some of my Mom’s favorite stories of me are when, as a 5 year old, I would ask her certain things like "where do we go when we die?" or "is there a God?" I would then take about a week to think about what she told me and then ask a follow up question to try to understand. That doesn’t necessarily make me different or special or smart, it’s just how I operate.

And that’s partially why it’s taken me so long to come up with an answer to Dave P.’s question. The other, more obvious reason is that I had only been here a week and only dealt with people that worked desk jobs fairly far from the fight up to that point. Now though, after having read what I’ve read and after having talked with or listened in on soldier’s conversations, I think I’m finally ready to answer that question.

In the early days of this war the Iraqi people, by and large, were very happy to have had the Saddam regime removed from power. It wasn’t exactly rose petals on the streets and parades welcoming the American liberators (as the administration would have liked), but they were certainly jubilant. The future was full of hope and possibilities in a way that it hadn’t been in decades.

It was during that time, in the days after the now infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner was hung over the head of the Steely-Eyed Rocket Man, that the Army leadership in the Kurdish North had even considered letting the troops go on patrols in the largest of cities without having to wear their (now ubiquitous) plates for their interceptor body armor or Kevlar helmets.

That decision was never made. Once Ramadan 2003 came around, the increased activity in and around Baghdad had apparently worked its way to the North. Ramadan had, looking back, brought upon a level of activity that was unprecedented for even the violent Southern regions (those regions were, of course, getting much more violent at the time as well). It was a surprising turn of events for the personnel on the ground, and for many it is difficult to understand what happened even now. I can’t say that I fully understood until I read an article entitled Baghdad Year Zero on Harpers.org by Naomi Klein (who I’ve become a major fan of recently) – which I discussed in this earlier post.

Now, it appears that there have been two distinctly different reactions to the rise in violence in Iraq in general and towards the US specifically. The first and perhaps the most understandable from my point of view is the confusion, fear, and a general longing for home. I don’t want to make it sound like those who are confused, frightened, and who just want to go home are cowards or something. They are, without a doubt some of the most courageous people, they have to be. Every day, they have to make a decision, go out and do the mission, or face criminal charges: a decision that is being played out quite publicly in the press right now. Fighting an enemy and possibly ending up as one of the unlucky ones that return missing appendages or with a Traumatic Brain Injury or not fighting and ending up in prison for a large chunk of their lives.

Frankly, it’s a position that I’m not sure I could deal with, it is difficult enough to deal with the situation that I’m in which is many times better than any Army troop. But for the Army troops in this position, it doesn’t get much better back home. Though they can finally sleep through the night without having to constantly worry that they’ll get a mortar coming through the ceiling of their "hooch", at home they will be facing other, terrifying decisions.

It is no secret that no small part of the appeal of being in the military is that it offers job security, health benefits for your spouse and children for life, and a promotion system that is fair and offers a sense of accomplishment along with hefty salary increases for each subsequent promotion (this is especially true for officers). But there’s something more compelling than all of that which keeps people in the military: fear of the civilian world. It is these fears, both real like maybe not having health care and imagined like not being able to find any good work, which keeps many in the military until they retire. Let me tell you, this is changing. I met someone just today that is going to get out after 13 years in the military. I’m sitting right next to someone with 18 years of service that is getting out as soon as he can. If you haven’t considered this to be a problem, you should, and I can guarantee you the military does. This is a prime example of how this war is weakening the military.

The problem is that the military has something called stop loss and the less well known stop move. If stop loss is enacted, that means that no one who is affected (it is sometimes service-wide other times it is by specialty) can leave the military regardless of how many years they have in or when they applied for separation or retirement. If you think that stop loss is a policy that is well advertised when you enter the military, you’d be wrong. Stop move, which I haven’t seen enacted without stop loss also being enacted, is a program that is designed to keep fighting forces together. Essentially all Permanent Changes of Station (PCS) moves are stopped and all personnel are frozen in place until the stop move is lifted. If you have deployed two different times for one year tours and are looking forward to a different assignment with another unit that maybe just got back and won’t be going any time soon or are maybe going to a desk job, you may be forced into yet another deployment with your current unit.

Stop loss and stop move are the policies that constitute the backdoor draft. Make no mistake about it, if you are "stop lossed" you are no longer a volunteer in the military. You are now a conscript in every sense of the word.

All this adds up to a deep sense of despair and a great deal of frustration among the members of the military. Is it any wonder that there are so many soldiers committing suicide?

Those who are confused, scared, and frustrated are one of the groups that I’ve encountered. The other group is perhaps a bigger concern to the future of America. The genesis is a similar one. The story begins, yet again with the confusion of the sudden elevation of events during Ramadan of 2003. Up to that point, the Iraqis had been relatively peaceful and easy to work with, and following that, the Iraqis were not only dangerous but they were also beginning to be frustratingly difficult to work with. Where they once had treated the Americans as liberators (albeit rather cumbersome and frightening at times), they were now (thanks to L. Paul Bremer and the Bush Administration) viewing the whole mess altogether differently. The Iraqis had started to revolt against not only the Americans, but those who were supporting the Americans. Shopping areas were now posting signs that said they would not serve the coalition forces. More unnerving were the marked increases in suicide bombers, particularly in the North.

Where some had become confused, frightened, and wanted to leave the military altogether, another group has become enraged, they have begun to consider every Iraqi to be an enemy. What’s more, their perhaps "requisite racism" (as a professor of mine who had been to Vietnam had put it about the troops back then) began to come out. I heard one troop talking about how he was developing new Pillars of Islam, "the first is never shower," he said, "the second is to kill yourself for Allah." These people weren’t confused at all, they knew that being there and killing Iraqis was and is keeping America safe. I found this story from the Washington Post that gives you some idea what I’m talking about:

"The citizens are frustrated; everyone is frustrated," he said. "My house, for example, has been searched three times, and the last time they were very aggressive. They broke down my door. I was asleep in my house with my children, and suddenly [a soldier] was standing in front of me. I said, 'I am a doctor.' He said, '[Expletive] you.' "

It is people with the same attitude that killed the 36 Iraqis that I talked about in a previous post. What is much more of a problem is that people with the same attitude are the ones in charge. I know this first-hand, I have seen them talk, and I have heard the briefings. Things become justified, better Iraqi deaths than American deaths. If Iraqi National Guardsmen or Iraqi Police run away, they are as good as dead to the Americans. If a business closes its doors to the coalition, we go ask them ever so nicely to open their goddamned doors to us. If a city revolts, we cut off their water and electricity for days. The Iraqis are less than people; they are animals that need to be trained and by God, they are going to be trained. This is exactly what went wrong at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

It is at the same time tough to blame the soldiers that are out there trying their hardest not to become one of the unlucky ones and all to easy to blame them for their actions. They are simply trying to survive but they are willing to climb over as many dead Iraqi bodies as they must to do so. It is the same group mentality, fear, and willingness to follow orders that through time has made it possible for people to commit war crimes. I’m not charging that there have been war crimes, that is an incredibly horrendous charge for which I simply have zero hard evidence. What I am saying is that everything is coming together in a horrible (yet all too common) way. I will not be surprised if we do in fact find out that there were terrible war crimes at some point in the future.

You can’t easily group everyone into one mold or the other of course. There are those who fit a little of both, those who simply delve themselves into their work, and there are those who let all their frustrations out into a blog (and who get silenced for doing so).

I don’t know what will come of this war for greed, this war for corporate profits. But I do know that this is my generation’s Vietnam. Someday, it will be a soldier from this war that is running for President.

I just hope that person is from the first group rather than the second…

Are you Conservative and tired of this administration?

One of my readers informed me about a great blog called Republican Switchers. One of the reasons that I've been saying that Kerry is going to win in a landslide is because of what have been unofficially deemed the "sane Republicans". They are those people who can't stand the fiscal irresponsibility, the simplistic world view, and the downright hubris of this Administration. The site is filled with Republican endorsements of John Kerry. If you're conservative generally but you're not convinced that voting for Bush is a good thing, check this site out.

Pie Chart from Hell, special Sunday edition

I said that I was tired and I didn't feel like posting, but I decided to go ahead with the PCfH anyhow. So enjoy!

I'm back, well not back back, but um...back...

Well that was a great title huh? I'm at my normal computer, kind of tired, and not feeling much like posting right now.

So I'll end it with that.

Friday Lyrics Blogging (late again)...

This whole Friday Lyrics Blogging is becoming about as wrongly named as Bush's Clear Skies Act. I do have an excuse this time what since I've actually been busy for once and all. I've been trying to use lyrics that fit in with my burgeoning anticorporate activism lately, and today is no different. The only difference is that these lyrics themselves are not anticorporate, although the band was. The song is London Calling by the late '70s early '80s band The Clash and is an ominous foretelling of the Western world collapsing under the weight of war and technology going out of control.

I don't know who owns the right to the song, but it ended up in a Jaguar commercial a couple of years ago. The focus of the song in the commercial was the "London Calling" line. The Jaguar would drive by one of those obligatory red London phonebooths whenever that line was repeated. They used the song to make the car out to be some kind of hip yet upscale automobile adventure targeted, of course, toward those who grew up in the early '80s. Shameless is one adjective that comes to mind, stupid is another. It's a prime example of how low marketeers and corporations (in this case Ford Motor Company) are willing to stoop to brand their crap. It's a great song, and for all of these reasons, it makes the Friday Lyrics Blogging List.

The Clash London Calling:

London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared - and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look at us
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the REIGN of that truncheon thing

The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning - I, I live by the river

London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go at it alone
London calling upon the zombies of death
Quit holding out - and draw another breath
London calling - and I don't wanna shout
But while we were talking I saw you running out
London calling, see we ain't got no HIGH
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes

The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in
Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear ERROR, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning - I, I live by the river

Now get this
London calling, yes, I was there, too
An' you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
And after all this, won't you give me a smile?

London Calling

I never felt so much a' like

Great Cartoon...

It's too wide to post in here (I will, ultimately be changing my template to make it wider etc.) so for now, just go here. It is a Tom the Dancing bug cartoon strip and it is directly on point, visciously funny, and concerns one of my 10 reasons to vote out Bush in '04.

Excellent.

Quite a day...

Today was a very successful day. Once again, I can't tell you exactly why. I can say that I was able to do something that I never thought that I'd be doing. It really wasn't that big of a deal to accomplish, but it was fairly crucial to the Army. I saw Colonel Cranky™ again, he was less cranky, but I think that he's just kind of an ass in general. One of those types of guys.

At any rate, things ended up going super smoothly. I have to be here one day longer than I expected, but that's no big deal. It's not too bad here, the food is good. I had some great chili today ... twice. When it gets dark around here, it's eerie though. Except for the occassional car passing by and the lights on the front of buildings, there is absolutely no lights here at all. You could seriously hold your hand in front of your face and not see it. It's that dark. I'm glad I have a flashlight. I stayed out to watch the stars for a long time last night. You could see just about forever as long as you were looking above say 30° above the horizon -- it was awfully hazy. You could see the Milky Way like crazy, very neat.

So I obviously haven't posted the Pie Chart from Hell or the Friday Lyrics Blogging post yet. I'm working on the latter and will do the former when I get to my Photoshop CS enabled computer. However, as you can see, I am inside of 60 days remaining which means that I've completed over 1/3rd of my time here. Nice. Only two short months to go...

Okay, time to go for now unfortunately. Maybe I'll have to get to the Friday Lyrics Blogging later...

I have to post this, please read it...

Vietnam ended some four years before I was born. My awareness of the world that I lived in didn't come around for another 8 or 10 (or was it 28?) years, so I wouldn't know much about that war. I can tell you one thing, I know a hell of a lot more about this war than I want to know; which is, obviously, far less than some. Maybe for me, Vietnam simply wasn't so real. It was a different time, a different place it seems. The teenage years of our country almost. The people were different I supposed (dispite the fact that the people were many who are reading this blog), the morals were different, it didn't occur to them that it was wrong. We've come farther now I've reasoned to myself. We've come farther...

Haven't we?

I got a call last week from a soldier -- it's different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He's an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It's a place where we claim we've done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.

It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary... It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn't explicit -- we're talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody...

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you've complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back. You don't need that. And that's where we are with this war.

From the sounds of it, that may have happened very near where I am right now. I am going to do what I can to verify or discredit this.

I have to...

Changes to the blog...

I finally got around to putting up the web banner that I created. I like it a lot. I think I should have emphasized "an empowered and informed member of society". Just so you know, all the text comes from a Radiohead song called "Fitter Happier" from their OK Computer album. It is essentially about what we're told to be by the mass marketeers that boils down to what we are to them: a pig in a cage on antibiotics, a fat disgusting animal forced to hear what they have to sell and kept just alive enough (hence the antibiotics) to keep consuming. We may feel empowered and informed, but that is simply an illusion fed to us to keep us motivated to consume.

It's a very post "The Bends" message...

The most interesting barbershop conversation I've had in a while...

First off, all the barbers where I work normally have all up and quit. I think there were 3 or 4 of them that one day all walked off the job. No one knows why, but we suspect it was because they were threatened because they are working with the US. I'm hoping it's not because they know something we don't. At about the same time that they left, another couple of shopkeepers went on a 2 week vacation. Odd.

At any rate, I was kind of glad that I was coming here so I could get a haircut. It had been about a month since my last snippy-poo so I was getting scruffy, especially around the ears. When I got in to the barber shop there was a couple of enlisted Army guys in there, the Iraqi barber, and some other Iraqi kid I guess to be in his early twenties. The US dorks were giving the Iraqi kid a very hard time. Seriously, if that is how they act to all the Iraqis, then it's no wonder that they hate us. Actually, come to think of it, the whole lets be an asshole to the Iraqis has been kind of a constant theme for the Army folks (right on up to the one star) since I got here.

So anyhow those US guys got their cuts and left which left me and another kid in the barber shop. I was sitting there patiently waiting, looking at how the mirror in front of me was scrunching up my head, when another crew of Americans walked in. Most of them (particularly one guy) were loudmouth jerks from the second they entered the room. But I noticed a couple of minutes later that the two dudes sitting next to me (who couldn't have been out of their teens) were talking about physics and time travel and such. Being as that is an area that is of particular interest to me, I decided to listen in.

I should say that it was one guy that was doing all the talking and one that was trying to keep up with the conversation. The one that was talking had read an article in Scientific American (I found out later) about "a laser that they made go faster than light so it arrived at a location before they shot it." This is a preposterous notion and I had a feeling that merely misunderstood the idea so I had to but into the conversation (having just looked it up, I now know that he is referring to Tachyons). Tachyons are theoretical particles that are said to have a mass of i (that's the square root of -1 to you and me Danny) and can travel at speeds greater than that of light. Here's one thing I found online: "Tachyons have never been found in experiments as real particles traveling through the vacuum, but we predict theoretically that tachyon-like objects exist as faster-than-light 'quasiparticles' moving through laser-like media." So that explains where the laser thing came into play. There was probably an article about Tachyons and perhaps they even discovered the existence of a Tachyon, I don't know, I haven't read the article.

At any rate, we talked a bit about why a photon couldn't exceed the speed of light and that there were some other means of exceeding the speed of light, namely quantum tunneling and an effect where two different photons can apparently influence each other over great distances instantaneously (which I just learned from the linked article doesn't have a name but is linked to something called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen phenomenon ... whatever that is). We then started talking a little about the inherent paradoxes related to time travel. The Grandfather Paradox comes to mind. If someone were to go back and kill their grandfather before he could have children, that person would never be born and wouldn't be able to go back and kill his grandfather but then he could be born and ultimately go back and kill his grandfather and so on.

The kid was fairly astute, which is far more than I can say about his friend. When talking about the particles that arrived before they left, the other kid said that they must have been traveling "sound speed or something". So I thought I'd throw a wrench into his gears. His assertion was that time travel wasn't posible because changing even the smallest thing in the past could affect things drastically in the future. Given that assumption, causality, that means that every single is determined by a previous event. By every single thing, I mean all of your thoughts and all of your actions too. Thus, your idea leads directly to determinism which means that free will is nothing but an illusion. All the things that you do, all the things that you think, all the things that you say are done, thought, and said not because you wanted to, but because you were destined to since the universe began. Someone else in the barber shop thought that was preposterous and let everyone know that he had free will.

The guy I was talking to understood I think and it definitely got him thinking. I only had time to touch on a few ways that people have tried to get around this. Namely that there may be an infinite number of universes all occuring at the same time (and that time itself is disrete rather than continuous) and that the decisions that we make literally move us from one universe to another. Kind of like a choose your own adventure. Sure, the available paths are already set and have always been set, but your stream of consciousness through those paths is up to you to determine. And, as the number of available paths goes up, the closer your chosen path is to free will.

Of course, that could all be hogwash, but it definitely got him thinking. Too bad we didn't have more time, but I had to get back here to check on some work stuff for tomorrow. At any rate, it made me hopeful that I found someone here amongst the cretans and jackasses that actually took the time to think about things like that.

Maybe he'll go to college one day...

Lots of news today...

So, as per normal, I didn't get to watch the debates today. Hopefully I'll get to catch a rebroadcast later today. I haven't yet had a chance to read the transcript and I probably won't get that chance until I get back since I'm limited to 30 minutes of computer time at one sitting while I'm gone. From what I've read (and I've only read Atrios and pals), it was more of the same. The promises of a big debate finale by Bush were drowned out by his un-Presidential delivery and his cranky-pantsness. Oh well, Bush has got 20 or so days to spin the series of debates into a win and get his crowd worked up into a frenzy. Rove is good at that.

In other news, it looks like the "independent" (read ultra right wing blowhard) talking head, Bill O'Reilly, has some 'splainin to do. Seems that he has found himself caught right in the middle of a sexual assault lawsuit. Apparently he's a real sexual deviant (not to mention a downright bastard). Oh, and it appears that he is threatening Al Franken (who Beth thinks is very cute) with an actual no kidding mafia-style hit by Roger Ailes's goons. The good folks over at Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly, International (an organization of hope) have more. Why is it that it seems like none of the folks who instruct us all how to act can never live up to those instructions?

In other news, there have been some rumors that Bush is suffering from some kind of disease. Some of the talk is based upon the book "Bush's Brain". In that book, the author (a psychologist) details that in one of the President's physicals they removed some kind of something from his nose -- some kind of spider vein something or other (I'm no doctor, so I don't know the facts). According to the author, whatever they pulled out, it is indicative of liver disease generally. Any reports from physicals that deal with Bush's liver have not been released which is also curious. Furthermore, Bush has decided not to get his physical this year until after the election.

Time for me to go now, I'll write more later.

Well, here I am...

Of course, none of you know where that is, but rest assured I am there and in one piece. The helicopter ride out here was very interesting. But, like everything else, I don't want to say much about it just so everything is confidential.

So, suffice it to say that I'm here.

I got my first care package yesterday. It was from Beth and it had five dozen chocolate chip cookies, two bags of gummie bears, two disposable cameras (yes, Mr. aspiring wanna be photographer has 2 disposable cameras as his only means of visually recording his travels), a picture of Beth, AA batteries, and a stuffed animal that reminded Beth of me. All in all, very nice.

So I was just looking at my stat counter and I think I've gotten my first wierd search engine result. If you go to AltaVista and type in "BA Baracus Jewish" (without the quotes), this blog will be the very first result! NICE! I of course had the post about Col Cranky™ and the post about the Eid al-Fitr stamp where I said don't forget about the Jewish something or other.

I can't remember if I mentioned this before I left or not, but I created an advertisement web banner for this site before I left on this trip. It's not so much an advertisement since I'm not paying any actual money, but ... well ... whatever. At any rate, I'm so proud of it that I'm going to put it up on this page somewhere. Not forever, but just for a little while so people can see it. It took me a while to get the hang of doing animation in Adobe ImageReady, but I think I finally figured it out. Let me know if you like it.

On the road...

Looks like I'll be on the road for a few days. I don't want to say where I'm going or exactly when I'll be leaving obviously. I should have an internet connection where I'll be so hopefully I'll be able to do some blogging and gmail checking while I'm gone. But if I can't, don't freak out, I'm A-OK.

That is, if you are the freak out type...

Also, I'm planning on doing a big "advertising" (no money will actually trade hands) bonanza on BlogExplosion. There may be undesirables making silly comments on the blog and they may increase in frequency up until the election. And, I may or may not try to find the time to refute thier silliness. If it gets out of hand I'll simply disable the comment thingy until after the election. Right now, it seems that it should be just fine.

Well gotta go, I'll be back soon.

Another day, another $3.50...

I'm not supposed to be here right now but the helicopter left without me, so here I am. I wasn't exactly looking forward to leaving, but it is going to be a short, easy trip so it really won't be a big deal. I have to go take care of the issues that Colonel Cranky™ (thanks Amy B.) was pittying the fool over. Actually all the issues are worked out, and I just have to be there to make sure everything is safe. Yay. At any rate, I'm going to be gone tomorrow for most of the rest of the week so the Friday Lyrics Blogging and the Pie Chart from Hell® may be moved to Saturday or Sunday.

So I've found yet another web diversion. It's called blog explosion. Essentially, blog explosion is a service that allows bloggers who are interested in increasing their site traffic can register their blog with the service. That blogger then surfs other blogs on the blog explosion site to gain points. The more points you get, the more surfers blog explosion referrs to your site. The best part is that people who use the service are genuinely interested in increasing their blog community so to speak so real blog flow (as opposed to just clicking past each blog without much of a glance). Also, hopefully people who are using the service will have something worthwhile to say which means that there'll be limited numbers of 14 yRoLdSwRiTiNgWiThAlTeRnAtInGcApSaNdNoSpAcEs..haha.. So all you blogging types that are reading at ease, head on over to www.blogexplosion.com and put me as a reference!

In other news, I am busy preparing for the last 10 days of the election. I am furiously writing the top 10 reasons not to vote for Bush on November 2nd. My plan is to unveil one reason per day starting on the 24th and ending on the 2nd. It's getting to be go time and hopefully this series of posts will have some kind of affect on someone. The only problem that I'll have is keeping the posts svelt and deciding which 10 to choose from.

I think I'll manage...

Haloscan is back!

Hopefully it'll stay. I like reading everyone's comments to the blog. Even though I get them on email, it's not the same. At any rate, I'd like to thank everyone who has been reading and posting comments to the blog. Actually, I'd like to take the time to say "hi" and "thanks for reading" to those who have been reading and not posting comments on the blog.

Everyone's support makes this trip go by a lot faster.

The unfortunate aftermath of Bush's hometown paper endorsing Kerry...

For weeks now we have been told horrific (and completely unsubstantiated) stories about those mean old Democrats who have been ripping out Bush Cheney 04 yard signs, keying the cars of poor hard working Americans with Bush Cheney04 bumper stickers, and even going to Toby Keith concerts looking for some poor sap with a pro-war T-shirt to gang up on. You of course don't need any actual evidence to back those accusations up, the word of some guy with a website (and not pictures of desecrated yards, images of keyed cars, or arrest records - none of which exist) is all you need. Obviously liberals would do that, they hate America and, by default, they hate everyone who supports real true Americans like Bush and real true American causes like invading Iraq.

So this story obviously comes as a surprise. It must be just the work of a few well meaning and energetic, but misguided, patriots. Right? Right?

Here's the scoop, Bush's hometown paper, The Crawford, Texas Iconoclast recently endorsed John Kerry for President. That in and of itself says something; however, I think the reactions of some of the citizens of Crawford says much, much more. As the paper puts it, they have never received the reaction from Democrats in previous years (when they endorsed Bush last election, Reagan twice, or Clinton in 1992 for instance) that they received from Republicans this year. The reaction includes threats to their business, threats to businesses who advertise in the Iconoclast, and threats of bodily harm to those on the staff of the Iconoclast.

Real, model Americans at work there I'm sure...

Haloscan comment thingy is now blocked...

The Army web-gurus have decided that it would be best to block any access to www.haloscan.com for some reason. So, it would appear that I am unable to access directly or make any comments on my own page. I have the system beat though since I set up the account to email me when comments arrive. That should be good enough for the rest of the time that I'm here and I'll be able to resume commenting normally once I get back to civilization.

In the mean time, don't feel bad if I don't respond to a comment you made on the blog and rest assured that I am in fact getting all of your (much appreciated) comments. For those comments that deserve a private response, I will email you, and for those comments that deserve a public response, I will make it a blog post.

What else have I got to do these days?

You don't know where I've been Lou!

Sometimes I wish I could blog more about my job. Today there was this Lieutenant Colonel that, after I passed on some possibly bad news, came in with another (more easy going) Lt. Col. and basically stared at me for 10 minutes while the other Lt. Col and I talked over some issues. Seriously, it was the longest Mr. T stare I've had in a long, long time. I thought the guy was going to take out his big spikey haired aggression on me by beating the hell out of me. The thing is, I would just stand up and take the beating of a lifetime (ala Tyler Durden in Fight Club, hence the title of this post) because that would be my ticket home. That's all just a pipe dream of course.

The Army essentially has absolutely no idea how the USAF works ... at all. Moreover, there are so many rules that you have to abide by to get the USAF to work with you that when the Army accidentally breaks one of those rules (or in this case someone gets the wrong idea that the Army broke an Air Force rule) they start to panic like you wouldn't believe. This guy obviously gets into full up BA Baracus mode when he gets panicky so he decided to "pity the" closest USAF guy ... me. Unfortunately for him, I'm Teflon® out here.

I don't think he got the resolution he was looking for. My answer essentially was, from all the information that I have, it doesn't appear that you've broken the rule in this case; however, if the USAF guy that is actually seeing the issue first hand says you broke the rule, well then you'd better have a backup plan because you won't get the USAF support.

This is all a little cryptic, perhaps, because it has to be. Anyhow, that wasn't the first Army guy that was pissed and came to me barking up the wrong tree and it won't be the last. You know, if they thought to give us a phone system on which I could actually contact someone, this issue may very well have been a non-factor. You hear that Army, get some goddamned phones that work!

Rosebud...

Do you ever feel like someone just let you in on a joke? I watched Citizen Kane last night. I'm not sure it was what I expected, I guess I'm not sure what it was that I did expect. It was original for its time, I'm certain of that. I'd say that it's still considered innovative in some ways.

Some of the themes I found still apply today. The one that I found particularly interesting was when, as a youn newspaper magnate, Charles Foster Kane said that he creates the news, that he tells people what to think. Isn't it interesting that he made his "Inquirer" such a success by siphoning off the respected writers of other newspapers and then coercing those writers to write sensationalist half-truths all in an effort to increase circulation. The birth of "newstainment" as it were. It must be the model for a certain other "news" organization that I know of.

Also, The White Stripes have a song titled "The Union Forever" in which all the lyrics are pulled verbatim from Citizen Kane. Apparently last year some time, Warner Brothers was looking into suing the White Stripes for copyright infringement for doing just that. I haven't found anything that indicated the status of that lawsuit.

Debate roundup...

Well I finally got to watch the 2nd debate. I think it's probably on here live somewhere, but at some ungodly hour due to the time zone difference. So, whenever there is a debate, I get to watch the re-broadcast on the Armed Forces Network. The best thing is that there are no commercials so I don't have to deal with the AFRTS public service announcements and crappy in-house commercials (AFRTS is legally prohibited from showing commercials and besides, as they explain it, it would make it exceedingly expensive for some reason that I don't understand).

I have to say that this, again, was a show of the two drastically different characters of these two men. John Kerry came off as a statesman who is knowledgeable about the topics, courteous but forceful, and unflappable in the face of statements that would leave me with nothing to say but, "Seriously, you are such a moron." Time and time again, Bush pushed his "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" message. The thing is, I really don't think that resonates with most voters. Sure Bush's base hears the rallying cry, but the I don't think the undecided voters really think that taking a stance that is not decidedly pro-war is equivalent of unable to conduct the war. Furthermore, I think that most people understand (and John Kerry has been fairly effective at conveying this) that John Kerry was saying that the Iraq war was against a foe who had nothing to do with our national crisis since 9/11, i.e. terrorism. Part of Bush's problem during the debate is that he's been pushing an ineffective message. Well, the reality of the world (which comes knocking as if it doesn't know that it'll hurt Bush's election chances) doesn't help him much either.

So what I found interesting were people's reactions to the debate. I, obviously, got to watch the debate with about 20 or so of my closest M16 toting, DCU wearing companions. There are some who were vocally conservative, some who were less vocal about their conservatism, and those who were liberal. I would say that this particular segment of the population was about 50/50 conservative/liberal. Actually that's not what I expected, but interesting none-the-less.

So I wanted to just observe the reaction of the crowd. I had read the transcript already so I was only there to see how it actually went down. What I noticed was a definite sense of despair among the conservatives. There were a lot of frustrated spurts of air, some "but Kerry didn't vote for the body armor did he?" to the older, "wiser" pal who simply shook his head no (I wanted to explain the whole thing, but I figured at this point, why bother?), and there were some desperate manly, macho "Bush is such a stud" and "Kerry is a liberal pansy" comments.

An interesting thing happened when a Colonel walked by and saw the crowd of people watching the debate. He saw someone he obviously knew, an enlisted kid, and said something to the effect of, "Why are you even watching this?" The kid just smiled and kind of shrugged and smiled meekly to which the Colonel replied, "You're not voting for Kerry are you?" The kid was kind of speechless and shrugged again. "You'd better go get your ballot, don't want to miss out on the vote," said the Colonel. "I already got the ballot, sir," said the kid meekly. "You are voting for Kerry!" bellowed the Colonel in deeply southern-accented, half-joking tone. "Ballot's already sent in, sir," said the kid. To which the Colonel walked off laughing.

There were of course liberals in the crowd. As the debate wore on, Bush's answers got worse and worse. I'm not sure if anyone noticed the whole "I own a lumber company? News to me" comment (you can read all about why Bush and Cheney would be considered among one of the 900,000 small businesses that would be affected by the tax cuts at factcheck.org), but I was laughing all the way back to the blogs. The best moment of the night for me was Bush's non-answer (standard) to the person who asked him to name 3 mistakes he's made. "He didn't answer the question!" were the shouts. "He isn't being specific about what little he did say" when he talked about mistaken appointments (my guess is that he meant Chalabi). It would have been frustrating if no one said anything about his standard dodge, but they did so I loved it. I thought Kerry capitalized nicely as the last answer of the night too.

Seriously, Bush can't take responsibility for anything. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise for someone who has never, ever had to take responsibility for his actions in his whole life. The buck always stops somewhere over there for Bush. The bad economy was Clinton's and Osama's fault, the piss poor job figures are the recession's fault (interesting since he claims the recession was the shallowest in modern history), not finding WMD is the CIA's fault, the events in Iraq are the Iraqi's fault, and so on.

You know it's amazing, it seems like the Bush team didn't learn from his 40 minute long, unbelievably embarrassing pause at the one press conference. They obviously didn't think to prepare for the "what mistakes have you made question." It was a direct question and he danced around it like he has two left feet. He can't for some reason bring himself to say, 1) I made a mistake by not only planning for the best case scenario in Iraq, 2) I made a mistake by getting this country so far into debt that it doesn't seem like we'll ever get out, but here's what I'm going to do reduce the debt, and 3) the jobs forecast that I signed off on (the one that predicted 9 million more jobs than there are now) was based on faulty logic and piss poor planning and I made a mistake by not listening to the economists, but here's what I'm going to do to change that. See, how freaking hard was that. Admit to your mistakes (probably THE biggest sticking point with a lot of voters is that he never admits to a mistake) and then explain what you're going to do to correct them. That way you've taken on the criticisms of yourself head-on and you've shown us that you have a plan that is somehow different than what you've done for the last four years. Then, all Kerry could say would be "I don't think your new plan would work because..." That would make it his word against mine type of thing.

But no, instead we've got a President for whom the buck stops somewhere far, far away. Fortunately, that makes him sound like a dishonest weasel which is convenient since that's exactly what he is. Honestly, do you really think this guy deserves another four years to try to get it right?

I sure don't...

Pie Chart from Hell...

The "It's Friday Somewhere" edition...

Well this has been another quick week, let's see how our pie chart from hell is doing shall we?



As you can see, I have, by popular demand, re-included the picture of Tacoma into the PCoH and updated its looks a bit - I made my computer sweat with my 1337 ph0705h0p 5k!11z lolz!!!!1!1!111! (elite photoshop skills for all you non geeks out there). This, I have a feeling, will be a constantly changing process so please feel free to provide any feedback you have on the looks of the PCoH.

Maybe it'll even be on Friday next time!

A Child's ABCs of Terrorism...

By Steve Perry

A is for Al Qaeda and amnesia. Are you old enough to remember when the war on terror was being fought against people who actually attacked us?

B is for Bush and Bin Laden. They hate each other, but they could never be the same without each other--just like lots of mommies and daddies!

C is for Chalabi and the cap President Bush would like to pop in his ass. Ahmed Chalabi was the man America paid lots of money (over $340,000 a month) to make up scary stories about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But that's not why President Bush is mad at him. He's mad because last month Chalabi was caught trying to organize a coup against the US occupation forces. No more allowance for you, Chalabi.

D is for dirty bomb. Did you know a dirty bomb (that's a regular bomb with radioactive materials inside it) could render an area the size of Manhattan uninhabitable? Just imagine how much trouble you'd be in if you rendered an area the size of Manhattan uninhabitable! D is also for Department of Homeland Security. Do you know what the Department of Homeland Security would do if someone detonated a dirty bomb? Neither does the Department of Homeland Security!

E is for Election Day and end times. Many experts believe there will be another terrorist attack in America before Election Day. Other experts believe the president is only using the color-coded terror alerts to scare people into voting for him. And some millennial (muh-LEN-ee-ul) Christians don't really mind, because they believe we live in end times, meaning that sometime soon Jesus will invite all his friends up to Heaven and kill everybody else.

F is for faith-based and Fox News. Do you know the difference between something that's faith-based, like President Bush's saying that God told him to invade Iraq, and something that's made up, like the evidence President Bush presented for invading Iraq? (Ha! Tricked you--there isn't any difference.)

G is for governing council and Gitmo. Let's use them both in a sentence: If the Iraqi governing council doesn't do what we want it to do, its members will all be sent to Gitmo.

H is for hegemony and Halliburton. Hegemony (huh-JEM-uh-nee) is when you're so big and powerful you can do anything you want, like appointing a horse to the Roman Senate or openly handing out billions of dollars in contracts to people everyone knows are your friends. H is also for hubris.

I is for Iraq and ignorance and infantilism. Did you ever notice that when President Bush talks to grownups about Iraq, he talks to them like they were children--and they let him? Silly grownups!

J is for jihad and Jenna. Jihad (JEE-hod) is holy war against imperial, infidel Western elites (eh-LEETS). Jenna is the name of one of President Bush's daughters. Do you suppose jihad will still be going on when Jenna Bush becomes president?

K is for Kerry and K-Y Jelly. Would you like the chance to be a hero when you grow up? President Bush wants you to have that chance! Did you know John Kerry would make you grow up and marry your best friend--and it would even mean kissing them and stuff? Ick!

L is for liars.

M is for "Mission Accomplished!" and memory hole.

N is for neocon and 'Nam. Do you remember being very little and having nightmares about monsters lurking in the shadows and hiding under beds? Well, guess what--they were neoconservatives, and they're so evil they make your grandma and grandpa miss Nixon!

O is for oil and occupation. When a president does something bad, he's supposed to get impeached. (Impeachment is a time-out that lasts until you die.) Do you want to know something funny? Occupying a country for its oil is not an impeachable offense, but oral sex is. We can't tell you why--better ask Mom or Dad about that!

P is for pretext, which democratic nations like ours must have before they can go to war, and the press, which is what very important people like presidents have in the place of pets. This will help you remember: The press helps presidents purvey their pretexts.

Q is for Qusay and quicksand. Qusay and Uday were the sons of Saddam, and they were all very bad men. When your parents were younger--a whole year younger!--President Bush used to tell them a bedtime story about how the Iraqi resistance would fall apart when Qusay and Uday and Saddam were gone. (Ask them if they remember that story!) Quicksand is when you get into something you can't get out of.

R is for Rumsfeld and Richard Clarke. Donald Rumsfeld is the secretary of defense. That makes him the top civilian official at the Pentagon. All the generals think he's nuts. His nickname is Rummy. Did you know that "rummy" is also a word for people who are so far gone they can't be trusted to do anything right? Richard Clarke wrote a book that said Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush and all their friends were bozos. (Bozos are people who have no idea what's really going on around them--kind of like rummies!)

S is for sooo many words. S is for Saddam and sadism (those prisoners will talk) and sodomy (we'll make them talk!) and Sunni and Shi'ite and--oh boy, our head already hurts! S is also for Saudi Arabia--wouldn't you be mad if your friends gave money to people who were trying to kill you? Not President Bush! He is a Christian, and Christians are supposed to forgive. He also loves oil. Does that make him an oily Christian?

T is for terrorism and tax cuts. Can you solve this problem? President Bush wants to invade Iraq. But foreign invasions cost billions of dollars, and President Bush has just passed huge tax cuts. How's he ever going to pay for the war? It's a very hard problem, but you may take as long as you need to solve it. Put your head on your desk when you've finished. Hint: Don't forget to compound the interest! (Did we mention that D is also for debt, and S is also for Shit Happens?)

U is for undercover. Sometimes spies pretend to be someone they're not so that they can learn the secrets of bad guys. That's called being undercover. Once there was a CIA agent named Valerie Plame who was undercover. But then her husband wrote a story in a newspaper that said President Bush was lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. So the White House wanted to be mean to him, and they told everybody that his wife was an undercover CIA agent. Can you see where the White House made its mistake? That's right--blowing the cover of a secret agent is a felony!

V is for victory. President Bush says the war on terror could last more than a generation. That means you'll have kids by then. When it's over, be sure you have a really nice parade, and take them to it!

W is for the whole wide world, which hates us now. Silly world!

X is for exit strategy and X-president. President Bush's dad is already an X-president. A lot of people hope it runs in the family.

Y is for yellowcake. When President Bush gave his 2003 State of the Union speech, he said Saddam tried to buy yellowcake from a country called Niger. But he knew it wasn't true. Yellowcake is milled uranium oxide. You wouldn't want to eat it--it's used to make bombs. President Bush had to eat all the yellowcake in his State of the Union speech, and he's still sick from it!

Z is for Zawahiri and Zarqawi. There are so many terrorists whose last names start with Z that it's hard to keep track of them all! Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the one who cut off an American's head in a video. Ayman al-Zawahiri is Osama bin Laden's best friend. But Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi don't like each other at all. See how confusing it is?

Now for something completely different...

This matches my personal best. I may not be great at everything, but I'm pretty damned good at minesweeper.

More Granddad thoughts...

I also pondered reading the following two passages from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass. I was almost prepared, but it seemed that the funeral was very religious, whereas, I am not, and neither, in my view, are Whitman's passages. Again, maybe I should have just spoken my mind, but it just didn't seem like the right place.

So here's what I had on my mind:

From "Song of Myself":

6

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

...

52

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Friday lyrics blogging...

My previous lyrics have been decidedly political. This week, I'm going to switch gears because I've been thinking about my Granddad a lot today and yesterday. The song is Long Road by Pearl Jam. It originally released on the CD Merken Ball but the rendition that I like best (and the one going through my head) is from the America Tribute to Heroes soundtrack. The latter is a particularly heartfelt duet with Niel Young. I thought about speaking the lyrics at Granddad's funeral, I don't know why I didn't. Maybe it would have been easier for me now, after knowing that much of the family is reading my thoughts. I think, in part, I just felt wierd, it didn't seem real. I mean, the funeral was in Phoenix. I just don't have any significant memories of Granddad in Phoenix. I guess it just didn't seem like the right place.

Maybe I should have said something anyhow. If I did, it would have been this and something else that I'll post in a bit.

Pearl Jam - The Long Road

And I wished for so long
Cannot stay
All the precious moments
Cannot stay
It's not like wings have fallen
Cannot stay
But still something's missing
I cannot say, yeah

Holding hands are daughters and sons
And their faiths are falling down, down, down, down
I have wished for so long, how I wish for you today.

Will I walk the long road?
Cannot stay
There's no need to say goodbye
All the friends and family
All the memories going round, round, round, round
I have wished for so long, how I wish for you today

And the wind keeps blowing
And the sky keeps turning grey
And the sun is setting.
The sun will rise another day.

I have wished for so long, how I wish for you today
I have wished for so long, how I wish for you today

Will I walk the long road?
We all walk the long road.
Will I walk the long road?
We all walk the long, long road.

I'm procrastinating...

So I'm procrastinating reading No Logo. I've been looking forward to it for months, literally months, and yet now I'm procrastinating. See, here's the thing, I have a feeling that I know what it's going to say. I also know who I am and the values that I've had since I was a kid. It's more than a little difficult to read something that you know will ring true and will require such a major change in my lifestyle. It's a little overwhelming and I guess I'm a little nervous. I should just get on with it, like a band-aide, just rip it off, the sting will go away and the hair will go back eventually.

We should reform the Electoral College system...

Surprisingly, there are still people who argue in favor of the Electoral College system. I've heard two arguments on its behalf. First, and least convincing, is that the Electoral College system forces candidates to campaign in states that they would otherwise ignore. The argument is that the Presidential candidates would spend their time bouncing from New York, LA, Houston, and Chicago all the while flat out ignoring whole swaths of the country in an effort to drive up their numbers. Of course, I don't see how that's much different than what we've already got. Bush would be stupid to spend his time in Texas or Alabama, and Kerry wouldn't do much for himself by campaigning in Massechusets or Washington. No, the candidates and the country watch as the candidates are forced to bounce between Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and the other swing states. Republicans in California are left out in the cold, Democrats in Alabama fare no better. If you are a blue-stater living in a red state, you may as well not even vote.

Of course that brings up the second and much better argument for the Electoral College. Just as a whole demographic can be left unrepresented direct elections in a state (the national election is after all 51 direct elections for the electoral college members), a national direct election can result in the exact same thing. So if 51% of the electorate were Republican and 49% were Democrat, the Republicans could pretty much do whatever they wanted. That is called the tyranny of the majority and that's a very bad idea. This article in Discover Magazine explains why the electoral college has prevented this very thing since its inception. Basically, the article explains that mathematically the electoral college is the ideal way to run an election that is very large in scale.

Then why are their such problems with the Electoral College system? The article's premise is based on a couple of assumptions: first, that the candidates will not be preferred equally and second, that there will only be two candidates. The author conceeds that his model breaks down when the elections get close and he doesn't even begin to mention the effects of other candidates on the outcome of the election. Another problem I have with the first assumption is that it assumes people will chose a candidate because they've researched that candidate, that people choose their candidate based off of the candidate's positions rather than an ideology that candidate may or may not actually hold, and that the candidates don't have the ability to influence the electorate in one direction or another. Those assumptions are all false of course, and given that plus the idea of spoiler candidates means that Natapoff's mathematical model is bunk. The election of 2000 proves that without a doubt.

There are other options that do not have the problems of a direct election or of the electoral college system. One method is to let the voter give every worthwhile candidate a vote. So if it were Gore, Nader, Bush, I would give one vote for Gore and one vote for Nader. Others may give only one vote for Bush. Another, better option is to rank order the candidates. Say you have the example of Nader, Gore, Bush, and Buchannan, I would give Nader 4 votes, Gore 3 votes, Bush 2 votes, and Buchannan 1 vote. Someone else would maybe give Bush 4 votes, Buchannan 3 votes, Gore 2 votes, and Nader 1 vote perhaps. This style of voting would completely eliminate plurality candidates (e.g. Clinton was elected with 43% of the votes) and would allow people to vote for whomever they chose without worrying that their vote amounted to a vote for someone they didn't like. It is more fair and it opens up the political race to anyone qualified. That is the system that we should have in my opinion.

We need to do something about fundraising as well. Anyone who is qualified should have the chance to be President even if they aren't rich. Ideally, I would prefer a system in which the government has very limited rules about campaigns; however, in the beginning of the new system (if it were ever approved) the government would need to create rules that would level the playing field for other parties' candidates. Things like free advertising or set federal funding and others that I'm sure I haven't thought of would be imperitive.

As you can see, there are plenty of major hurdles to any changes, not the least of which are the two party system is so entrenched and so powerful and any changes must go through them. I guarantee if Bush gets the popular vote and Kerry gets the electoral vote there will be changes.

Just like there should have been after the 2000 election...

Oh what the hell, if I put it off I'll just forget what I had to say...

There's going to be several posts right in a row, bear with me...

Cursor shines a light on all the news about the Iraq war today, I have provided a summary in case you don't want to actually go to Cursor. First, any WMDs that Iraq had previously had been destroyed a dozen years prior to the US invasion. Second, the White House was "heavily involved" in the writing of the speech that Allawi gave in the US and in his first speech to the Iraqi National Assembly he took a "sharp departure from the more optimistic assessment" he gave to the US. Third, Bremer is trying to spin his latest statement (that the US did not commit enough troops) as 20/20 hindsight, when, in fact, he had asked for more troops (with no results) in mid-2003. Fourth, and this speaks for itself, "We can't count the war as costing what it's going to cost because the money's been earmarked to be spent, but hasn't been spent yet. By that standard, my car cost $622" according to Pandagon's Jesse Taylor. Fifth, Colin Powell gives a $10 million grant to teach democratic skills to Iraqi women to a group formerly known as Women for Clarence Thomas. Sixth, the Pentagon has misappropriated money earmarked for small businesses to the military-industrial machine. Sixth, all of the service academies have reported a drop-off in applicants. Seventh, France was prepared to provide as many as 15,000 troops for the Iraq war before relations soured. Eighth, Cheney is a liar, and we have the footage to prove it. And finally, does W. stand for wired?

Lots of stuff on my mind right now...

Electoral College reform, lots of Iraq news that I bet the administration wishes would just go away, No Logo and the reason I'm procrastinating after looking forward to it for so long, song lyrics, poetry, and my Granddad.

I want to get to all of that because I want to talk about my idealistic (and perhaps unrealistic) political goals, my anti-Bush agenda, and a continuation of my self-discovery.

But not now, I'm not up to it right this second...

I'm fair, but not balanced...

Received some criticism that at ease attacks Bush but neglects to attack Kerry. Now, I don't pretend for one second to think that criticism is in any way invalid, because it isn't. Don't think of this blog (or any blog for that matter) as a news source ala CNN or the New York Times. Think of me as an unpaid editorial writer. My goal on here is to post my opinions with all their inherant bias without being misleading. Yes, it is a fact that I will not be attacking Kerry like I attack Bush, at least, not until after the election.

It is obvious that Kerry is the best candidate for President, and I will do what I can to help him get elected. This blog isn't much, but it's all I've got. The one promise I make to you, dear reader, is that I will be honest. I will not distort the facts, I will use reputible sources when I can, and I won't be malicious (there are plenty of websites that will do that, so you don't need me to do it too). But if you've come to this blog expecting to find balance, you will be disappointed.

Now, as for my politics, be advised that I am very far to the left. In fact, I am infuriated that Kerry is as much of a free marketeer as he is. We need to get Bush out of office, but I will have my eye on Kerry for the next 4 years. If he continues down the path of globalization, I will make it known, and I will not vote for him in the next election. I will not support a President who, like Clinton, had the chance to make real progress on national health care but decided to support NAFTA instead. And I think Kerry should take that as a warning, the far left will abandon you in droves and cost you the next election if you go down the path of globalization. It happened with Gore when the far left went to Nader, and I guarantee it will happen to Kerry if he follows the same track.

My point is that Bush is so much worse, he is such a corporate thug, he has embraced globalization and anti-humanist policies like no other President in this country's history. This year, we must vote him out. All we need to get people motivated to vote against Bush is to expose his record and his lies, that is my goal.

At least, in my political posts...

Take a look at your shirt...

Take a look at your shoes, your underwear, your pants, your hat, your glasses, your computer, your hamburger, your soda. Who did you feed by purchasing all of that? Who did you starve? Our world is filled with the warez and the trinkets of the ultramega corporations. In the sea of bright red, gold, navy blue, khaki, and grey we incorporate their logos as a part of our own identity, until one day we begin to identify ourselves by those logos. Are you a coke or pepsi man? A McDonalds or Burger King woman? Nike or Reebok, Dell or Gateway, Apple or Microsoft, Fox or CNN, Times or Post, Gap or J Crew? Who are you? Are you smart or funny or cool because of the swoosh on your shoes, the soda in your hand, the 'O' on your sunglasses? Was there net community benefit or an overall societal decline because of your Wal-Mart shopping spree? Who did you feed, who did you starve?

I'm no better. I'm no different. I live in a life of luxury compared to the migrant worker or the 7-year-old sweatshop worker or even many less fortunate Americans. I've got all the obligatory gear, and I've got my eye on more, yet the fact that my gold toe socks may have been made by a child for a fraction of a penny hasn't ever crossed my mind. How does one go about bringing about change? I suppose you first have to be aware of the problem, then you have to change yourself. Something tells me that the 2nd part of the equation is going to be incredibly tough.

I've begun No Logo in case you're wondering...

A rising tide...

Blogger is wierd and other oddities...

So when I posted the previous post, the one about how to lose weight, I was pissed because Blogger did the usual and ate it. Well, I thought it ate it at least. I must have refreshed a dozen times last night trying to see if the post would pop up. It never did. So, frustrated, I just left thinking I would take care of it tomorrow. When I come back in today, the post still wasn't there so I figured it was gone.

So I was checking out some of the comments on here and Beth's friend who was Maid of Honor at our wedding (Hi Lanae!) mentioned in the comments that she thought it was odd that I would have a pink mini iPod on my Amazon wishlist. Now this is odd for all kinds of reasons not the least of which is I'm not much for pink. I of course already have a 20Gb MP3 player that I like a lot, I can't stand iPods, and I just don't remember ever putting an iPod on my wishlist. So I figure that the link that I put up must have been some kind of universal link that would send people to their own Amazon wishlists if they were logged into the Amazon site. Or maybe something else odd was going on. At any rate I decided to invite myself to view my wishlist and I used the link that Amazon emailed me.

When I fixed the link in blogger and republished the blog and then refreshed, my post from last night appeared out of nowhere. So anyhow, enjoy the last post and check out my wishlist. Hopefully you'll actually get to see my wishlist.

If you're so inclined...

Forget the fad diets...

The New York Times has a great article from some researchers that explain what you have to do to lose weight. The answer? Eat foods that are high in fiber and water content ... you know, fruits and vegetables ... and make sure that you burn more calories than eat.

Here's a handy formula: Multiply your current weight by 11 if you are sedentary, 13 if you are moderately active, and 15 if you are highly active to get the number of calories you need to eat in a day to maintain that weight. So if someone is 200 lbs and is moderately active they need to eat 2600 calories a day just to maintain their weight. You don't want to lose weight too quickly. Losing one to one-and-a-half pounds per week is ideal they say. Keep in mind that one pound of fat is 3500 calories. So to lose one pound a week, you need to take off 500 calories per day from the level that will maintain your weight. So that 200 lb person above would need to eat 2100 calories per day if he wants to lose one pound per week. Keep in mind this 2100 calories can come from absolutely any source. If this 200 lb person ate 2100 calories worth of bacon or chocolate or pasta per day and lose the exact same amount of weight as if he ate something filling and healthy like vegetables, fruits, whole grains ... you know, a healthy diet. The benefits of a healthy diet are things like more energy, less stress, clearer thought, better vision, and a longer life.

One pound per week may seem slow, and it is. The idea is that you should change how you eat for the long run. If the 200 lb person starts in January, he will be 196 lbs by February, 187 lbs by April, 178 lbs by June, 157 lbs by Halloween, and 148 lbs by New Years Eve (the person will have to recalculate his required caloric intake from time to time). Of course, depending on body structure, a person may not be capable of weighing less than a certain ammount and weighing too little is almost as bad as weighing too much. Go here to find your ideal weight.

But how are you supposed to track all your damned calories in a day? There are some very helpful tools online that help you do that. I like FitDay, but you may be able to find some others by using Google.

It can be tough, believe me, I know. But I also know that you can see results (I know you can see them in both directions unfortunately).

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I got an email today that I want to refute publically...

If you ever get an email like the one I'm about to quote, just tell the sender to come and take a look at this post (the perma-link is the time stamp in the bottom left-hand corner).

How ironic is this??!! They don't even believe in Christ and they're getting their own Christmas stamp, but don't dream of posting the ten commandments on federal property? USPS New Stamp This one is impossible to believe.. Scroll down for the text. If there is only one thing you forward today.....let it be this!



REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of PanAm Flight 103!

REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993!

REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon!

REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the military barracks in Saudi Arabia!

REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the American Embassies in Africa!

REMEMBER the MUSLIM bombing of the USS COLE!

REMEMBER the MUSLIM attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001!

REMEMBER all the AMERICAN lives that were lost in those vicious MUSLIM attacks!

Now the United States Postal Service REMEMBERS and HONORS the EID MUSLIM holiday season with a commemorative first class holiday postage stamp. REMEMBER to adamantly and vocally BOYCOTT this stamp when purchasing your stamps at the post office.

To use this stamp would be a slap in the face to all those AMERICANS who died at the hands of those whom this stamp honors.

REMEMBER to pass this along to every patriotic AMERICAN you know.

Where to begin, where to begin? How about the first line: "They don't even believe in Christ and they're getting their own Christmas stamp..." The word "they" makes it sound as if it's an us against them; like it is Muslims vs. patriotic red-blooded Americans. Of course, that neglects the fact that there are 1,104,000 American citizens who are Muslim (as of 2001, scroll down to the tables). There are of course other religious groups who don't believe in Christ that get their own "Christmas" stamp (I presume the author means "Christmas time" or "Christmas season" since, as even the author pointed out, it is a stamp for Eid al-Fitar, the celebration at the end of Ramadan). The ultimate in Chirst non-believers, the Jews, get their own Hanukkah stamp, there's a Kwanza stamp, and there's even a lunar new year stamp (year of the monkey this year) for the chinese-americans (an fraction of a percent of whom are Christians). Of course what the author of this vile forward neglects to mention is that there are a half-dozen Christmas stamps. Is it really such a travesty that the USPS commemorates the holidays of the world's major religions particularly when millions of Americans celebrate each of those holidays? Of course not. Let's continue.

The forward goes on to say, "...but don't dream of posting the ten commandments on federal property." This is of course the sticking point for all right wing religious zelots. The US Supreme Court has, time and time again, stopped state establishment of religion (any religion). The 10 Commandments are no more and no less allowed to be posted than, say, the 5 pillars of Islam. Just how much of an uproar would there be if a muslim teacher decided to post the 5 pillars on his wall or decided to lead his classes in a muslim prayer (with full kneeling and bowing towards Mecca)? Do you think people would just let it slide because they think schools ought to have the right to do that? Please. The fact of the matter is, the USPS is only able to have Christmas stamps because they honor every other religion with stamps. The government can't hang the 10 commandments in a school or a courtroom because it excludes a large percent of the US population, similarly the government can't have only Christmas stamps as that would be exclusionary. It's as simple as that.

The email then asks you to remember various terrorist acts all of which are perpetrated by muslims. Sure, fair enough. Let's remember some other terrorist acts shall we?

REMEMBER the WHITE AMERICAN PROTESTANT MALE bombing of the Alfred R. Murrah building in Oklahoma City (the largest terrorist act on American soil until 9/11).

REMEMBER the IRISH PROTESTANT bombings in Northern Ireland.

REMEMBER the JEWISH raids on the Gaza Strip.

REMEMBER the CHRISTIAN shootings of abortion doctors.

REMEMBER the CATHOLIC Crusades!

REMEMBER the CHRISTIAN slaughter of the Native Americans

REMEMBER the CHRISTIAN slavery of Africans

By the forwarded email's author's logic, we shouldn't honor any religion's holiday with a stamp. After all, every religion's people have been responsible for horrible attrocities at one time or another. Maybe we should adamently and vocally BOYCOTT all religious stamps. Of course, just as not everyone of a particular religious or idealistic group identifies or agrees with the actions of Tim McVey, the Crusaders, slave owners, abortion doctor snipers, or the Israelies, not every Muslim is a terrorist. I'm appaled and amazed that I even have to make that argument. It's as if 9/11 was perpetrated or applauded by every Muslim anywhere in the world (including those Muslims who are American citizens). There have been not only individual Muslims that have spoken out against the actions of Osama bin Laden, the governments of Muslim nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Pakistan, and Oman have come out against his actions and have been supporting the US effort against bin Laden since the days immediately after 9/11.

I feel that emails of this nature are inherently unpatriotic. Patriotic Americans celebrate the diversity of the USA, patriotic Americans want to make sure that every American is represented and has a voice. Those who want to make America out to be some kind of one religion theocracy are the ones who are not patriotic, not the other way around.

Be advised, if I get vitriolic forwarded emails like this, I will deconstruct them on my blog every time. Think carefully about forwarding to me emails of this nature.

I know it isn't Friday, I just wanted to test this out...

So I know it's way too early for the test of the Pie Chart from Hell, but I wanted to test out the new system I've got going. Let me know if you like it! As you can see, I'm 20 days into the deployment which means I've only got 70 days left. So it looks like this:



Hopefully it isn't too bad...

Landslide for Kerry and the Dems to take back the Senate!

Quoted from www.electoral-vote.com since they don't seem to have a perma-link:

Not much news on the presidential front today, but a lot of news on another, much less talked about front: the Senate. Five Democratic senators from the South are retiring at and end of this session of Congress: John Breaux (D-LA), John Edwards (D-NC), Bob Graham (D-FL), Fritz Hollings (D-SC), and Zell Miller (D-GA). Only three Republicans are retiring: Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO), Peter Fitzgerald (R-IL), and Don Nickles (R-OK). In addition to these eight open seats, one other seat is semi-open: Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is fighting to actually be elected to the Senate seat her dad the governor appointed her to.

Early in the year, the Republicans couldn't control their glee at the possibility of picking up as many as five Senate seats in the South, which has become increasingly Republican over the years. But a funny thing happened on the way to the election. The voters had different ideas. Not only are the Democrats holding four of the five seats in the South, but they are leading in all three formerly Republican seats. They are also leading in the only two really contested seats in which an incumbent might lose: Alaska and South Dakota.

If the Senate election were held today, the Democrats would take control of the Senate, 52-48 (counting independent Sen. Jeffords as a Democrat, since he caucuses with the Democrats). And this realignment does not take into account the possibility that Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) might pull a Jeffords and jump ship. He is from a hugely Democratic state and, like Zell Miller, would be much more appreciated in the other party. The only reason Chafee hasn't switched is out of a sense of duty to his late father, John Chafee, who was a respected Republican senator from RI. Here is the current polls. For more details about the individual races, see the Senate page.

State	Democrat (pct)	Republican (pct)
Alaska	Tony Knowles (47%)	Lisa Murkowski (41%)
Colorado	Ken Salazar (50%)	Pete Coors (46%)
Florida	Betty Castor (49%)	Mel Martinez (43%)
Georgia	Denise Majette (37%)	Johnny Isakson (53%)
Illinois	Barack Obama (68%)	Alan Keyes (17%)
Louisiana	"John" (47%)	David Vitter (44%)
North Carolina	Erskine Bowles (45%)	Richard Burr (44%)
Oklahoma	Brad Carson (44%)	Tom Coburn (37%)
South Carolina	Inez Tenenbaum (46%)	Jim DeMint(43%)
South Dakota	Tom Daschle (48%)	John Thune (46%)

Louisiana is a special case since the Senate election is nonpartisan and three Democrats and one Republican are competing against one another. The two Democrats who have a chance are Chris John and John Kennedy, collectively referred to here as "John." If no candidate gets a majority on Nov. 2, there will be runoff in early Dec.

History shows us that, in the USA, when Washington is too concentrated in power either liberal or conservative, the people will change that. The neocon revolution is, despite what we're being told, no exception. We're being told that this is a close race, and that the Democrats are lagging behind a bit. Don't you believe it.

Thanks to the radically conservative agenda of the Bush Administration, people are fired up to not only get Bush out, but to also vote in liberal Senators. I stick with my Kerry in a landslide prediction.

Oh and did you note the Barak Obama vs. Batshit J. Crazy stat? 68 to 17. Nice!

I'm going to strangle blogger...

Seriously.

So if any posts look wierd or repeated about 5 times it's because blogger is acting retarted today. Bear with me.

Bug bites and a sore knee...

So I woke up last night and noticed that I was scratching my arm. Then I noticed that my arm was absolutely itching like crazy. I tried to just ignore it, I hoped that it would ultimately just go away, but it was so bad that I couldn't even fall asleep. So I flipped on the light and started looking for the can of spray bug repellent that the military issues to us when we deploy. I guess I thought that if I couldn't do anything to reduce the itchiness, then I would do what I could to prevent myself from getting bitten again.

So I searched, and searched, and searched for that damned can of spray. I finally found it in one of my bags and looked at the instructions. "WARNING," it read, "Do not get in eyes," fair enough "mouth," yeah okay, "ears," odd but whatever, "or on skin." Hold on just a second, don't get on skin? What the hell kind of bug spray is this? "Do not inhale fumes." What the??? "Spray on clothing and do not touch until dry." Oh for crying out loud. I eventually took out a long sleeved T-shirt that I brought and took it outside and sprayed it, being very careful not to actually breathe in the spray or let it touch my body. I was half expecting my shirt to dissolve or something. I let the shirt dry mostly then I put it on and turned down the AC and went to bed. Right before I turned out the lights, I looked at where the bug bites were (on my left tricep) and noticed that there were two rather large odd shaped lumps. At any rate, I was able to fall asleep and when I woke up I noticed that it didn't itch anymore.

On my way to the gym I noticed something else though. My goddamned left knee was hurting an awful lot. Mostly it hurts when I step up onto something or step down from something. I had the flight surgeon check this out at my last physical and he concluded that my kneecap wasn't tracking correctly because one of my leg muscles was stronger than another. This, he said, was causing the kneecap to rub up against the bones in my knee and was aggravated by running. So I guess the same thing is happening now since I've been running so much which pretty much sucks.

So I guess I'm going to have to knock off the running thing for a while. I'm also going to start including the exercises that the doc recommended to get my leg muscles to work properly. Oh and I'm going to grimace when I go up or down steps or over rough terrain.

I don't really like running all that much anyhow I guess...

Sunday in Iraq...

I can't believe how fast this last week went. That's awesome! I'm thinking my routine helped me get through all of this much more than I thought it would. Also, this blogging thing has really made it easier on me (and easier for some of you too I hear). I've toned down the politics a bit so that at ease is readable to more people. I can't say that I'm not going to get political every now and again, but for the interest of not alienating half of everyone out there, I'm easing up a bit ... oh, and because Beth asked me to ease up on the politics. Don't say I never listen.

I've also decided to take more personal time out of my day. Those who have emailed me may know that it appears that I've got nothing but personal time in my day. While that's true, I don't feel that I can very well watch movies or read (other than the internet) when I'm at work. To that end, I have decided that I am not going to stay here in this building until bedtime anymore. I'm going to watch my movies and read my books. I've got a stack of them. More to the point, I've got to get through this damned Alterman Book (What Liberal Media?). It's a good book on a good subject and it gets me fired up, but it's not something that I don't already know. I kind of feel that I'm just reading it to get caught up with the cool kids.

I'm almost caught up.

After Alterman is finished, I'm going to start No Logo. I can't wait. I also ordered seasons 2 and 3 of Oz. I should have bought them when I was in Qatar I guess. I wasn't in the mood to make that much of a commitment since I didn't know how those were going to turn out. Season one was good and it ended in a cliff hanger so now I need to see the other seasons.

Anyhow, I'm still here, and I'm still alive and kicking. I'll write more tomorrow.

Maybe that's why it's still a Beta...

I talked to Beth tonight and she told me that she hadn't received a reply to anything she'd sent me to my gmail account in about 4 days. I have received and replied to all of the emails that she mentioned so maybe something's messed up. Just in case something is afoul, I wanted to post it on the blog. If you have sent an email to my gmail account that has been unjustly ignored, it may be because of some kind of problem with my gmail account. If you could please let me know either via a comment on the blog or as an email to my gmail account, that'd be great.

Come to think of it, if you could let me know if you have gotten a reply from me recently could you please let me know so that I can tell if things are messed up?

Thanks!

(oh and this is a repost since I didn't learn my lesson to write my posts in notepad and the stupid Blogger ate yet another one of my posts ... totally awesome!)

Stupid piece of...ARGH!

I guess I'm going to have to write all my blogger posts in Wordpad or Notepad and then transfer them over to the blogger post tool so they don't get destroyed by a server error.

So my last post was about a band called The Books and their CD The Lemon of Pink. I'll recreate it a little later.

Stupid blogger...

Freud would say there's no such thing as a mistake...

So sometimes it seems like I sabotage myself. So yesterday was laundry day (for me at least). The reason that I like the laundry set up here is that you can get it back in the same day rather than 2 or 3 days like in Qatar or Bahrain. That means that I can do laundry on the same day that I run out of the thing that I'm shortest on: gym shorts. I only have 5 pairs, so I take my laundry down every 5th day to get it done with the expectation that I'll get the laundry in the evening and have clean shorts for the next 5 days. So I completely forgot to get my laundry yesterday.

The immediate thought that came into my head at 7:00 pm (the laundry closes at 6:00pm) is "well I guess I won't workout tomorrow". Argh! It seems that just when I get myself into a good routine, the right routine, I sabotage it. I decided that as a penalty (how silly is that, penalizing myself) I would workout in the only gym clothes that I had, lined running pants. I didn't workout for as long because the damned workout room is in a building with no air conditioning, but I worked out damn it.

I went and got my clothes today, so I should be set.

The second of two regular Friday blog features...

In the first installment of the regular features on at ease I entertained you (well ... tried to entertain you) by allowing you to wallow with me in the fact that I'm going to be here for a while. In this, the second regular feature, I am intending to bring a little art to your screen. More specifically, I'm going to post song lyrics that mean something to me at the time and why.

We'll call it ... um ... Friday lyrics blogging ... I guess. If you've got a better name, feel free to post it in the comments. Incidentally, I wanted to do this on one day of the week only so that this wouldn't turn into lyricsblog.blogspot.com or something.

So without further ado...

Radiohead - Electioneering

I will stop
I will stop at nothing
Say the right things
When electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote

When I go forwards, you go backwards
And somewhere we will meet
When I go forwards, you go backwards
And somewhere we will meet

Riot shields
Voodoo economics (bloodshed, bloodshed)
It's just business
Cattle prods and the IMF
I trust I can rely on your vote

When I go forwards, you go backwards
And somewhere we will meet
When I go forwards, you go backwards
And somewhere we will meet

Radiohead, again as in Dollars & Cents and plenty of other songs, are protesting globalization, capitalization, and how it is intertwined with governments and elections. Thom Yorke (Radiohead's lead singer) is a notoriously anti-IMF/Worldbank chap and expresses that and his frustration at government's collusion with the IMF and Worldbank (among other entities). I presume his songs are dedicated toward Tony's cronies particularly since the CD it was on, "OK Computer", was released before the reign of Bush. Radiohead's anti-Bush songs would come out after the Iraq war with such pointed titles as 2+2=5 and We Suck Young Blood. However directed towards one government Electioneering is, it is of course applicable to all governments that collude with the globalist forces. And, in a sense, it seems that this song is particularly relavent to the US elections in 2000 and the election fears of 2004.

Don't believe that electioneering is going to happen? Read this, this, this, this, and this. If my prediction of a landslide is wrong and this is a close election, then just keep this scary fact in mind: it will only take one miscounted vote per electronic vote counting machine or touch screen voting system to affect the outcome of the election. One vote is too small of a number to be able to pinpoint or even detect. It gives the line "I trust I can rely on your vote" a whole new meaning (which is, of course, the meaning of the song). Of course if there is a landslide, I can see the headline on "The Onion" now: Bush sues Diebold, ES&S for services paid for but not rendered.

Electioneering...

The first of two regular Friday blog features...

Tbogg has his "America's Worst Mother" posts on Friday, Atrios (and just about everyone else it seems like) has Friday cat blogging, so I'm thinking, hey, if you can't be original, you may as well embrace your unoriginality.

To wit, I've decided to start not one but two (2) special Friday features that are all my own. The first one is going to be called "The Pie Chart from Hell" and it goes something like this: on Fridays, I will capture a screen shot of an excel spreadsheet that I created that details exactly how much time I have left around here complete with a pie chart that has a picture of downtown Tacoma on it. This chart is automatic, so along with reveling in my unoriginality, I am also wallowing in my laziness.

So without further ado, I present to you, this week's Pie Chart from Hell:



Note dear readers, this chart is hard to read as of now, I will ultimately change that. But for now, get out your reading glasses.